illness
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Big Pharma Wants to Date Me, And Other Quirks of Being Sick in America
The marketing of healthcare to Americans is, along with the prevalence of mass shootings, one of the most disturbing phenomena I have encountered since moving back to the US in 2011, after six years of living in the UK.
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Women Dying from Being Women
Anne Boyer writes about the history of breast cancer for The New Inquiry. There is no disease more calamitous to women’s intellectual history than breast cancer: this is because there is no disease more distinctly calamitous to women. There is…
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Changeling
The story of how I wrote my second novel begins in 1999, when my four-year-old daughter Anna had a minor accident that caused massive intercranial bleeding.
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The Rumpus Review of Life Itself
I thought Roger taught me to watch, to look, to see. I thought he taught me to formulate opinions, discern a smart plot from schlock. I was wrong. He taught me that writing drives a stake into our time, priceless,…
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Strong Is the New Sexy
I began to lack reality. I took to baggy tops and A-line silhouettes to hide my poking collarbone, my meatless hips. I took up as much space as I could in bulky sweaters. I compensated for my diminishing reality by…
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Here Everything Is Possible
My mother died suddenly at a dining room table, in the middle of a wonderful meal, surrounded by a large, extended family that loved her. One minute she was completely immersed in the world—talking, laughing, eating—and the next minute she…
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Litany for My Mother’s Body
My mother’s body horrified me. Nine years old, I watched her dress. Her belly was rippled and sagged and scarred—a used-up bag of nothing.
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Dispatch from the Carnival #3: Bloodlust
What does not occur to me at the moment of this bloodlust, will not until much later, is that I am actively seeking the violence. I want to witness the worst.
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Like Tiny Little Cracks
Steve Prefontaine, known simply as Pre to the hordes of teenage runners who idolized him, once said, “Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it.”
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
It’s Monday. You’re working hard. Take a moment to stop and smell the weekend Rumpus roundup. First, Yumi Sakugawa takes us to the heart of the forest in a comic about a dead spider king. Then, Liz Prato starts coughing…
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: In Sickness and in Health
Years after losing her entire family, the author takes a romantic vacation in paradise and instead must confront the physical manifestations of her grief.
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Interpreting My Malady
The unpublished catalogue of fiction inspired by illness is limitless, composed every day, at every hour, in every hospital, clinic, hospice, and bedroom where the ill and injured and even the mildly indisposed attempt to make sense of our altered…