Writing About Illness
Filed Under (Writing) by Estee on 13-11-2009
‘Tis the season of H1N1 and I am reminded of how many writers write about illness. I began The Joy of Autism blog in 2005 whilst suffering from pneumonia. I devoured the prose and poetry of Audre Lourde when I was diagnosed with cancer. Here’s an excerpt from Virgina Woolf on illness I found interesting, and which reminds me why many of us are compelled to write:
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth – rinse the mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
From “On Being Ill,” by Virginia Woolf. First published by the Hogarth Press, 1930.
ESTÉE KLAR
TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA
Writer/Curator/Founder of The Autism Acceptance Project. Lecturer on autism & the media, and parenting. Graduate student Critical Disability Studies, York University. I like to write about our journey, musings, attitudes towards autism.
I think illness is written under the concept of the fragility of life and therefore becomes more poignant if written philosophically.
I particularly like the idea of how common illness is. While yes, it can provide a “spiritual transformation,” illness is as much a part of being human as is breathing and dying. Therefore, I picked the quote also because we tend to make heros of those who have been ill only because we fear what is really quite a natural part of being human. And while I do not like to make the connection between illness and disability, although illness can be an adjunct to disability, it its home how common disability is as well. I would also like to stress that a resistance to coining a disability as illness is in direct relation to society’s treatment of disabled people as “ill” and therefore unable, and less than. The whole thing should shed some light on how we view being less than perfect something bad.
It is not.