A Matter of Appearance: A Memoir (EPUB)

By Emily Wells “A Matter of Appearance is what the genre of ‘sick lit’ is missing: Wells ties up the loose ends between the rich history of hysteria, consumption, and modern stories of autoimmunity, while resisting the maudlin. Absolutely dazzling.” —Lena Dunham, author of Not That Kind of GirlA dazzling memoir of chronic illness that explores the fraught intersection between pain, language, and gender, by a debut author.Emily Wells spent her childhood dancing through intense pain she assumed was normal for a ballerina pushing her body to its limits. For years, no doctor could tell Wells what was wrong with her, or they told her it was all in her head.In A Matter of Appearance, Wells traces her journey as she tries to understand and define the chronic pain she has lived with all her life. She draws on the critical works of Freud, Sontag, and others to explore the intersection between gender, pain, and language, and she traces a direct line from the “hysteria patients” at the Salpêtrière Hospital in nineteenth-century Paris to the contemporary New Age healers in Los Angeles, her stomping ground. At the crux of Wells’ literary project is the dilemma of how to diagnose an experience that is both private and public, subjective and quantifiable, and how to express all this in words.
Product Details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Seven Stories Press (May 16, 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1644212765
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1644212769