FP Staff List: ILL FEELINGS + literary explorations of illness and disability

Alice Hattrick’s Ill Feelings—an intrepid meditation on illness, disability, feminism, and what it means to be alive—is now available from Feminist Press for US readers! In celebration of Hattrick’s genre-bending debut, we’ve created a list of literary explorations of illness and disability that we’ve treasured as readers. From Tessa Miller’s What Doesn’t Kill You to Alice Wong’s Disability Visibility, here’s what we recommend you read (after finishing Ill Feelings of course!)

All: Ill Feelings

by Alice Hattrick (Feminist Press)

“Complex and brilliant.” —Review 31

Lauren: Please Read This Leaflet Carefully

by Karen Havelin (Dottir Press)

“A clear-eyed exploration of how women’s health issues are rarely taken seriously...a clever unspooling of one woman’s psyche.”—The Paris Review

Margot: Deaf Republic

by Ilya Kaminsky (Graywolf)

“Described as a ‘parable in poems,’ Kaminsky's soulful new collection opens on an act of horrific violence before meditating on silence and deafness in times of political unrest. The language is exquisite; the ethical questions Kaminsky poses are provocative.”—Entertainment Weekly

Alisa: Deluge

by Leila Chatti

“To write a series of poems out of extreme illness is a bracing accomplishment indeed. In Deluge... Leila Chatti, born of a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, brilliantly explores the trauma. In a frightening two-year saga of a tumor and the ‘flooding’ it caused, Chatti finds not disassociation but deeper association with her own experience.”—Naomi Shihab Nye, The New York Times

Lucia: Sick

by Porochista Khakpour (Harper Perennial)

“Thank you, Porochista Khakpour, for writing an unflinchingly honest, complicated memoir about living life with Lyme. Sick should be required reading at every medical school!”—Kathleen Hanna

Vanessa: Disability Visibility

edited by Alice Wong (Vintage)

“Wong's discerning selections, bolstered by the activism that shines through, will educate and inspire readers.”—Kirkus Reviews

Nick: The Cancer Journals

by Audre Lorde (Penguin Classics)

“Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy.”—From the publisher

Rachel: Close to the Knives

by David Wojnarowicz (Vintage)

“David Wojnarowicz is brilliantly attuned to American talk and responsive to the moods and innovations of society’s truants. He also has the best conscience of any writer I know. This fierce, erotic, haunting, truthful book should be given to every teenager immediately.”—Dennis Cooper

Jisu: What Doesn’t Kill You

by Tessa Miller (Henry Holt & Company)

“In this riveting memoir, journalist Tessa Miller describes the sudden onset of severe Crohn’s disease in her twenties. . . . Evocative. . . . She analyzes studies and statistics about healthcare and chronic illness in the U.S., including racial and gender discrimination. It’s a fascinating and disturbing read.”―BuzzFeed