I was in my late 30s, and still comparatively fighting fit, when I first came across Simon Gray’s exquisite The Smoking Diaries, which catalogued the eminently fatal damage this thrilling curmudgeon was doing to his lungs with cigarettes. If we read to know that we are not alone, I can hardly fathom why his book so resonated with my younger, nicotine-free self, but the writing was wonderful. Likewise, when I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, her devastating account of how she coped after her husband’s death, my own spouse was, and remains at the time of going to press, very much alive.
I should like to point out that I consider myself possessed of a fairly upbeat disposition towards life. I do not suffer from depression, and sustain near-manageable levels of neuroses. But if, say, Christopher Hitchens writes about his own impending mortality in a manner so typically reluctant to pull punches that he titles it Mortality, I’m in. I don’t think I read a more involving book last year than Decca Aitkenhead’s desperately sad All at Sea, and AA Gill’s final column, on his “full English” of cancers, took my breath away.
My bookshelves bear abundant evidence of my sustained literary health kicks. There is Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive, Bryony Gordon’s Mad Girl, William Leith’s Bits of Me Are Falling Apart. Between them, Candia McWilliam’s What to Look for in Winter and the Canadian writer Ryan Knighton’s Cockeyed (the latter soon to be adapted for the big screen by Jodie Foster) are mesmerising on what life looks like when you can no longer see it. The Outrun, Amy Liptrot’s story of addiction and rebirth on Orkney was ravishing; Anna Lyndsey’s Girl in the Dark, which relayed how this former civil servant developed such an extreme sensitivity to light that she was forced to live in darkness, gripped me as much as anything by Stephen King.
So when I fell ill in late 2011, and found myself in the position of being able to write a health memoir of my own, I suppose I at least felt qualified for the task. My illness was a convoluted one – winningly for the book, less so for me in real life – and difficult to diagnose. My GP and immunologist were stumped. My constant state of eviscerating exhaustion was thought perhaps to be burnout, or complicated mitochondrial issues, or something else entirely, and because I didn’t meet any single criterion, I did not qualify for NHS treatment. And so I turned elsewhere for help, in the hope that I might be able to write myself out of my predicament, and towards a cure. It proved fertile ground.
While I was researching Get Well Soon, I continued with my peculiar reading habits. My wife showed concern. Long-term illness is a miserable state of affairs in itself, she argued, so why compound it by reading about the careless cruelty of strokes (Robert McCrum’s My Year Off) and living with constant pain (Tim Parks’ Teach Us to Sit Still)? I counter-argued that these were in fact wildly inspirational books, full of vivid life and mordant humour, alongside the most determined sense of optimism. I needed that optimism.
Since she published her memoir, The Last Act of Love, in 2015, Cathy Rentzenbrink has become something of an accidental expert on the genre. “I’m not sure I read very many health memoirs before I wrote my own,” she says, “but I’ve now come to love them. They are full of meaning and purpose.”
Rentzenbrink – whose book details her brother’s eight year coma after being hit by a car – is drawn more to those written by civilians than professionals. “If you are the one suffering, then you didn’t choose it, you are not much interested in it, you didn’t want it to happen in the first place. But this is what makes the genre so enthralling. I don’t want a doctor’s educated perspective; I want to read about the normal person who had been bumbling their way through life until something happened that they had to learn to cope with. And when they cope with it well enough to write a book about it – which is an arduous enough undertaking in itself – then that is utterly compelling.”
We tend to read such books, she believes, because there are lessons to be learned from them. If life throws us a curveball, what would we do in similar situations? “So when someone else has written about their own experiences, it’s like they are five minutes ahead of us down the road. And that five minutes can make all the difference.”
While some of us are drawn to all manner of bodily malfunctions for the sheer fascination of it, others are led by their own preoccupations. Cancer runs in Rentzenbrink’s family, and so she finds herself intrigued by memoirs on that topic. The most recent she has read, published last month, is the journalist Kate Figes’ On Smaller Dogs and Larger Life Questions, an unflinching account of life with breast cancer. “After I read books like Kate’s I squirrel them away on my shelf, in case it all starts going wrong at the next routine checkup.” At which point, she suggests: “I will go back to Kate’s book much more than I would consult the internet. I’m not interested in reading about the perfect patient, either; I want to read about someone just like me.”
One of the better selling new books this year is Somebody I Used to Know, Wendy Mitchell’s assiduous account of her early onset dementia. As bestsellers go, this was a somewhat unlikely one. But in the same way that people seek out cancer chronicles in the hope that they might prove instructive, so Mitchell’s has resonated for similar reasons: the longer we live, the more likely dementia becomes. We read to see how others cope in the hope that, if our time comes, we might cope, too.
When the writer, and now trainee psychologist, Eleanor Morgan wrote her first book, Anxiety for Beginners, in 2016, she worried about the consequences of making such a private matter – her own crippling anxiety – public, but also knew that it would strike a chord. “If you are interested in the human mind in all its complexities, then it makes sense to have an interest in books like these,” she tells me. “It speaks of an openness, and an inquisitiveness about all the variations of what it is to be alive. It’s about achieving greater understanding and empathy. Because where would we be if we didn’t identify with people who aren’t exactly like us?”
And so, though I might not have realised it at the time, all those health memoirs I’ve devoured over the years have helped fortify me for the obstacles life was waiting to hurl my way. They have made me a better reader, and they have upped my resilience at a time when resilience is what I needed most. Being able to write Get Well Soon feels nothing less than a privilege, and the response from readers and medical practitioners has been humbling.
Of course, I hope I will never find myself in the position of being able to write another one – I’ve had my sickness quota, thanks; all plain sailing from here on in – but I do know that I will continue to reach for them. “I think the more curiosity we have about how people deal with their own misfortunes, the better,” says Rentzenbrink. “The momentum I find in the best examples is very affecting. Every time I read one, I feel better for it. Don’t you?”
- Get Well Soon by Nick Duerden is published by Green Tree. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
