Eli Clare’s new book, Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming (2025), presents a challenge to disability studies. The most impactful challenges to this field over the past few decades have critiqued its narrow focus on whiteness, the West, and physical disability, with more recent work attempting to understand disability through intersectional and global frameworks as well…
Category: Arts and Creativity
Book Review: Liminal Spaces and the Moral Imagination in “Our Long Marvelous Dying” by Anna DeForest
Anna DeForest’s first novel, A History of Present Illness (2022), follows an unnamed medical student through tension-filled classroom and clinical years among more privileged classmates in New York City. DeForest’s follow-up novel seems a segue from the first. Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024) also features an unnamed narrator–one further along in their medical career– seeking…
Sweetness and Light: A Cooperative’s Effort in a Medical School
The ethical life is not first about decision-making but about discernment. It is concerned with the long and often painful work of coming to understand oneself within a world of obligations, histories, and relationships (Williams 308). This understanding of ethics was an animating conviction behind the Columbia Character Cooperatives—a professional and moral formation initiative for…
Thresholds of the Body
This spring, when I was recovering from a double mastectomy, I consumed a lot of media. Propped up on a wedge pillow as family and friends filtered through with food and news of the world outside, I binged season after season of television and read through some of this year’s buzzy novels. As the weeks…
Homemade Remedies and DIY Care in The Flame Alphabet
“I think of language as being tremendously potent. It causes deep feelings in us, so much so that its effects would seem nearly chemical, medical.” In his interview with journalist Adam Boretz for The Millions, author Ben Marcus explained the genesis of his 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet with the words above. Imagining language as…
Sex for the Dying: Palliative Kink and FX’s Dying for Sex
“The aspects of death and sex are intimately intertwined for both are part of life,” begins a 1968 article in the Journal of Sex Research; “This applies for the normally healthy human being in general, but it has special meaning for the patient with a life threatening disease such as cancer” (Schon 288). Published in…
Severing the Academic Mind
Dichen Lachman and Adam Scott in Severance, Season 2, Episode 7 (“Chikhai Bardo”), Streaming on AppleTV+. In the top image, the pre-severed Scouts talk shop while grading papers; in the lower image, Gemma writes thank-you notes in an eternal Christmas scenario. The AppleTV+ show Severance, which explores the lived reality of people who work…
Accounts of Estrangement: About Filaments and other Metaphors
In her book, Doctors’ Stories, Montgomery Hunter discusses the pervasiveness of narratives (e.g., diagnosis, cases study, rounds) in informing not only the medical encounter, but also medicine as an institution: “Patients’ stories within medicine are more or less pared-down autobiographical accounts that chronicle the events of illness and sketch out a commonsense etiology. . ….
Ghosts and Angels: The Supernatural in Illness Narratives
Image Credit: Angels in America, Millennium Approaches (1993) Poster, sourced from Wikimedia Commons under fair use license. Illness narratives often explore experiences that defy medical explanation. Sociologist Arthur Frank, writing about narrative and illness experience, argues that “telling stories is the attempt, instigated by the body’s disease, to give voice to an experience that medicine…
Take a Hike: A Guidebook for Getting in and out of the Head
In the writer’s guidebook for getting in and out of the head—for overcoming writer’s block— there is a paradoxical complement between the oft proffered advice to “go for a walk” and the instruction to create your “personal writing space.” Walking as a meditative and philosophical practice was famously romanticized in the Enlightenment period by the…