The Illness Essay

ABSTRACT

Montaigne invented the essay genre in response to a near-fatal injury. He produced a flexible, wandering form that was especially well suited to confronting illness, injury, and mortality. Literary critics, however, have focused attention on illness memoirs to the exclusion of the illness essay. Given the publication of a number of extraordinary book-length illness essays in 2013–2014, among them Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams, Eula Biss's On Immunity: An Inoculation, and Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby, critics should pay attention to the illness essay. Following Montaigne, these essayists examine the workings of the writers’ minds, explore tangents, and make unexpected connections. At the same time, they take advantage of the hybrid essay, blending memoir, contemporary journalism, and cultural criticism. Their projects overlap in notable ways. They all contemplate how people conceive of their own suffering and the suffering of others. And at the core of their work is a shared interest in the complexity of empathy, which they recogniSe as a felt response, a social practice, a philosophical conundrum, and a writer's tool. In the end, they affirm Montaigne's commitment to using the essay to contemplate how to live a good life.

KEYWORDS:

• Illness
• twenty-first century literature
• essay
• Montaigne

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric blends the lyric with the essay in a meditation on Americans, death, and the media. In The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, David Shields writes about his 97-year-old father who has ‘a relentless body’ (xv) and is ‘devoted to longevity’ (xvi).

2. See James Atlas's ‘Confessing for Voyeurs: The Age of the Literary Memoir is Now’; Stephen Elliot's ‘The Problem with the Problem with Memoirs’; William Gass's ‘The Art of the Self: Autobiography in an Age of Narcissism’; Neil Genzlinger's ‘The Problem with Memoir’; Lorrie Moore's ‘What If?’; and Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History.