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3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
slow-paced
This book is easily four times longer than it needed to be and reads like a sloppy first draft, or like somebody's ranty Facebook post. It is also grossly TERF-y and dripping with unexamined privilege. As someone with my own mysterious illness, I gained absolutely nothing from this book.
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
emotional
informative
inspiring
sad
medium-paced
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
This is one of the most important books you will ever read. I'm not kidding. This book affected me deeply, as a woman with a mysterious chronic illness that has been repeatedly dismissed and diminished or treated as "just the way things are." Sarah's story is leaps and bounds and lightyears more intense and severe than anything I have ever experienced, but we are members of the same way-too-big club of women suffering at the hands of Western approaches to health and wellness. I cried more than once, nearly threw the book across the room repeatedly, and hugged it when I was done. I have ordered multiple copies and convinced probably ten people to read it already.
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
There’s some really valuable stuff here but unfortunately it’s buried under layers upon layers of normal memoir navel gazing, a startling lack of awareness of privilege, and some very gross and unnecessary discussions of gender identity. It was a struggle after the first 100 pages or so.
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
slow-paced
Beautiful and depressing. Im glad I continued on and didn't quit on the book. - A fellow WOMI
Never have I felt so passionate about a book (in a BAD way), but this was not a good book. As a woman with a mysterious illness, I related to much of Ramey's frustrations and experiences, but my god was this book poorly written, poorly edited, and about 200 pages too long.
The first thing to annoy me was Ramey's tone and style of writing. The amount of line breaks was unreal. She writes like everything she is about to say is just epic.
And I mean epic.
Like, so epic, you will just start clapping from wherever you are in the world.
Because Sarah Ramey opened your eyes.
She opened your eyes to the world.
And, my dear reader, won't you be thanking her forever.
There was simply no need to address the reader so often, in such a condescending way. The entire book was somehow condescending and read like she knows everything from up there on her high horse, and aren't we just lucky she took the time to share her insights with us. (For example, you're stupid if you eat gluten.)
Here is an example of her 18-year-old-blogger voice:
"...understanding really is the first step in any kind of healing-emotional, physical, or otherwise.
And so all this was very nice. Very nice indeed.
But then, of course.
As always, as ever.
Like always, there was one rather large Snag.
The same snag as ever.
This body.
My body.
My poor old body."
This is such lazy, boring writing. I also didn't love her nickname for sick women, 'WOMIs' (I don't have a reason why, maybe it just bothers me in the same way I hate the term 'spoonies'). I found it annoying when she made a ranking of WOMIs (1-5) based on how severe their symptoms are. When she describes WOMIs 1-3, she calls them "not exactly sick", and later, goes as far as calling them "lucky ducks" because they often have "great results" from a paleo diet, some yoga, and a few supplements. WTF? Someone with mild-moderate ME/CFS or Lyme, fibro, etc. is certainly not "lucky", and I don't think you can really make such sweeping statements like that. I, for one, am in the mild/moderate range, and diets and supplements have made me worse.
Ramey is clearly a smart, educated, motivated, and ambitious person. She sets off on researching mysterious illnesses and trying to figure out the root cause of it all. Which is very relatable, but ultimately, she is not a doctor or scientist with the authority to make such huge statements accompanied by zero sources or references. I feel like she could have better achieved her goal by co-authoring with an MD. Some statements, for example:
"...Most medical schools do not offer almost any training in nutrition, and as we'll get into later, proper nutrition is the foundational and easiest way to prevent and sometimes reverse many chronic illnesses." (it feels dangerous to me to suggest you have the ability to prevent yourself from becoming chronically ill by having a certain diet.)
"That basic foundation of how to create health was just missing.
It was simply not there." (what?)
"Our health collapse is directly tied to women moving into the workplace..." (evidence, facts, sources...?)
And this banger, my god:
"In a world without wheelbarrows of sugar, cupboards of processed food, and IV lines of antibiotics, that is, in a world with fantastically healthy guts, grains would be much easier to tolerate.
This may be one reason you don't see WOMIs virtually at all in the developing world. But in the developed world, where ruined guts are commonplace, grains are revealed for what they are: moderately irritating to the intestinal lining."
YES, MY DEAR SWEET READER, SHE JUST SAID THERE ARE NO WOMEN WITH MYSTERIOUS ILLNESSES IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD!!
I don't have the emotional capacity to discuss the bizarre rant she goes on in the middle of the book which should have obviously been edited out, but my god, her obsession with gender is wild. Her language is not inclusive at all, and she consistently uses terms such as 'men and women', 'ladies and gentlemen', 'whether you are male or female', etc. which could all have been replaced with the word PEOPLE. I think she mentioned trans and non-binary people once, in parenthesis, and I can only imagine NB and trans readers feeling massively excluded and ignored. She talks about 'the feminine' a LOT, and genders everything:
"We all understand the male call to duty-our military-and we fund that call to duty to the gills. If there is a war, we know exactly what to do, and have the most prepared, skilled, well-funded military in the world.
Have you ever considered that there might be a female counterpart call to duty? One that is worth protecting, and funding to the gills?
I have.
And I think:
It's health.
Women are the keepers of health."
Sorry, what? Do I understand the 'male call to duty'?? Do we really know 'exactly what to do' when there is a war? SHOULD our military be so well-funded in the first place, or should it, i don't know, be redistributed into HEALTHCARE AND RESEARCH? But anyway, men go to combat and women make people healthy, apparently.
After far too many years of absolutely debilitating symptoms and horrendous medical neglect, Ramey writes that she realized her 'real superpower' is her 'near-supernatural ability to rise up from the dead ...
and my dear reader:
It's probably yours, too."
omg, no I do not have a superpower to make me un-ill!!!! And neither do you???
The end of the book was the hardest for me to read because instead of telling you what has helped her, she tells you that you MUST do it too. No matter how hard it is, and no matter how expensive it is. (You will figure out the money, she assures you.) She has a whole chapter about how important it is to 'just eat real foods' and then abbreviated it as JERF for the rest of the book. She claims that food is medicine, but it is not - food is food, and medicine is medicine. And fast food is not 'not real food', it's just not the same as a friggen carrot.
As someone who had traumatic experiences with treatments, and particularly diets, I found this very harmful. I have no doubt people will read this book and self-treat with a gut-healing diet under no medical guidance. This book made me feel bad for my eating habits, and that I'm not trying hard enough to 'get better' because I don't cook myself vegetables three times a day and I like bread. Ramey actually made me feel like I have no excuse for not trying harder to get better, which is not what I was expecting to take away from a book by a fellow sick woman.
There is ableist language used throughout; she equates being in a wheelchair to having a life of misery, uses terms like 'fall on deaf ears', etc.. The number of times she mentioned she had 'top-notch physicians' as parents was truly shocking; unbelievably poor editing. And she even shares that one of these top-notch parents (her father) likes to ask women who have complex symptoms if their right elbow hurts while peeing, as a way to trick them.
God I wish I had a book club to discuss this with because this book has truly been driving me crazy. How did it get published? What does publishing even MEAN? Does it even MATTER? I would have jumped at the opportunity to have my manuscript published by Penguin, but now it's all meaningless to me. This book reads like a rambling first draft, which makes me fear what the actual first draft was like.
I have so much more to say but I think I need to let it go.
And, dear reader, please do yourself a favor and don't read this book.
Unless you want to read it out of curiosity.
And discuss it with me.
Because I will be here, waiting, with my top-notch physician parents.
And we cannot wait to talk about it with you, my dear WOMI.
The first thing to annoy me was Ramey's tone and style of writing. The amount of line breaks was unreal. She writes like everything she is about to say is just epic.
And I mean epic.
Like, so epic, you will just start clapping from wherever you are in the world.
Because Sarah Ramey opened your eyes.
She opened your eyes to the world.
And, my dear reader, won't you be thanking her forever.
There was simply no need to address the reader so often, in such a condescending way. The entire book was somehow condescending and read like she knows everything from up there on her high horse, and aren't we just lucky she took the time to share her insights with us. (For example, you're stupid if you eat gluten.)
Here is an example of her 18-year-old-blogger voice:
"...understanding really is the first step in any kind of healing-emotional, physical, or otherwise.
And so all this was very nice. Very nice indeed.
But then, of course.
As always, as ever.
Like always, there was one rather large Snag.
The same snag as ever.
This body.
My body.
My poor old body."
This is such lazy, boring writing. I also didn't love her nickname for sick women, 'WOMIs' (I don't have a reason why, maybe it just bothers me in the same way I hate the term 'spoonies'). I found it annoying when she made a ranking of WOMIs (1-5) based on how severe their symptoms are. When she describes WOMIs 1-3, she calls them "not exactly sick", and later, goes as far as calling them "lucky ducks" because they often have "great results" from a paleo diet, some yoga, and a few supplements. WTF? Someone with mild-moderate ME/CFS or Lyme, fibro, etc. is certainly not "lucky", and I don't think you can really make such sweeping statements like that. I, for one, am in the mild/moderate range, and diets and supplements have made me worse.
Ramey is clearly a smart, educated, motivated, and ambitious person. She sets off on researching mysterious illnesses and trying to figure out the root cause of it all. Which is very relatable, but ultimately, she is not a doctor or scientist with the authority to make such huge statements accompanied by zero sources or references. I feel like she could have better achieved her goal by co-authoring with an MD. Some statements, for example:
"...Most medical schools do not offer almost any training in nutrition, and as we'll get into later, proper nutrition is the foundational and easiest way to prevent and sometimes reverse many chronic illnesses." (it feels dangerous to me to suggest you have the ability to prevent yourself from becoming chronically ill by having a certain diet.)
"That basic foundation of how to create health was just missing.
It was simply not there." (what?)
"Our health collapse is directly tied to women moving into the workplace..." (evidence, facts, sources...?)
And this banger, my god:
"In a world without wheelbarrows of sugar, cupboards of processed food, and IV lines of antibiotics, that is, in a world with fantastically healthy guts, grains would be much easier to tolerate.
This may be one reason you don't see WOMIs virtually at all in the developing world. But in the developed world, where ruined guts are commonplace, grains are revealed for what they are: moderately irritating to the intestinal lining."
YES, MY DEAR SWEET READER, SHE JUST SAID THERE ARE NO WOMEN WITH MYSTERIOUS ILLNESSES IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD!!
I don't have the emotional capacity to discuss the bizarre rant she goes on in the middle of the book which should have obviously been edited out, but my god, her obsession with gender is wild. Her language is not inclusive at all, and she consistently uses terms such as 'men and women', 'ladies and gentlemen', 'whether you are male or female', etc. which could all have been replaced with the word PEOPLE. I think she mentioned trans and non-binary people once, in parenthesis, and I can only imagine NB and trans readers feeling massively excluded and ignored. She talks about 'the feminine' a LOT, and genders everything:
"We all understand the male call to duty-our military-and we fund that call to duty to the gills. If there is a war, we know exactly what to do, and have the most prepared, skilled, well-funded military in the world.
Have you ever considered that there might be a female counterpart call to duty? One that is worth protecting, and funding to the gills?
I have.
And I think:
It's health.
Women are the keepers of health."
Sorry, what? Do I understand the 'male call to duty'?? Do we really know 'exactly what to do' when there is a war? SHOULD our military be so well-funded in the first place, or should it, i don't know, be redistributed into HEALTHCARE AND RESEARCH? But anyway, men go to combat and women make people healthy, apparently.
After far too many years of absolutely debilitating symptoms and horrendous medical neglect, Ramey writes that she realized her 'real superpower' is her 'near-supernatural ability to rise up from the dead ...
and my dear reader:
It's probably yours, too."
omg, no I do not have a superpower to make me un-ill!!!! And neither do you???
The end of the book was the hardest for me to read because instead of telling you what has helped her, she tells you that you MUST do it too. No matter how hard it is, and no matter how expensive it is. (You will figure out the money, she assures you.) She has a whole chapter about how important it is to 'just eat real foods' and then abbreviated it as JERF for the rest of the book. She claims that food is medicine, but it is not - food is food, and medicine is medicine. And fast food is not 'not real food', it's just not the same as a friggen carrot.
As someone who had traumatic experiences with treatments, and particularly diets, I found this very harmful. I have no doubt people will read this book and self-treat with a gut-healing diet under no medical guidance. This book made me feel bad for my eating habits, and that I'm not trying hard enough to 'get better' because I don't cook myself vegetables three times a day and I like bread. Ramey actually made me feel like I have no excuse for not trying harder to get better, which is not what I was expecting to take away from a book by a fellow sick woman.
There is ableist language used throughout; she equates being in a wheelchair to having a life of misery, uses terms like 'fall on deaf ears', etc.. The number of times she mentioned she had 'top-notch physicians' as parents was truly shocking; unbelievably poor editing. And she even shares that one of these top-notch parents (her father) likes to ask women who have complex symptoms if their right elbow hurts while peeing, as a way to trick them.
God I wish I had a book club to discuss this with because this book has truly been driving me crazy. How did it get published? What does publishing even MEAN? Does it even MATTER? I would have jumped at the opportunity to have my manuscript published by Penguin, but now it's all meaningless to me. This book reads like a rambling first draft, which makes me fear what the actual first draft was like.
I have so much more to say but I think I need to let it go.
And, dear reader, please do yourself a favor and don't read this book.
Unless you want to read it out of curiosity.
And discuss it with me.
Because I will be here, waiting, with my top-notch physician parents.
And we cannot wait to talk about it with you, my dear WOMI.
This book was interesting, but I got bored. I felt like it was repetitive and went around in circles. Very fluffy and full of literary comparisons to make dramatic points. I appreciate that style of writing to an extent, but I find it loses its effect when it’s employed on every other page. It would have held my attention better if the fluff had been reduced a hundred pages or more.
My jaw was hanging open when I read a part where she said that the way women are being treated, their totally valid concerns and suffering swept under the rug and stigmatized, is the same as what happened in the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
I had literally no idea the scope and devastation of the health trials that so many women, including several dear friends such as you, have experienced. Being generally supportive in a vague sense, even listening to some of the details at times, did not help me really get it. But my eyes are opening more and more now. The ideas in the book are heavy so it's slow reading but the I think the shift in perspective is going to have a monumental effect on my life.
It's frustrating. I think not just external sexism but internalized sexism i.e. the fact that women are trained to not complain, just live quietly in pain and discomfort, is a huge factor in why so many of us have these issues and just go along to get along. Unfortunately many women start having these problems after experiencing a precipitating traumatizing event, whether physical, biological, or emotional. So for all the good that my mom did for teaching me to try to eat whole foods and minimize sugar, unfortunately it's highly likely that what I have gone through with my background set the stage for all of this.
Despite growing up with *my* mom, this is my first real introduction to how diet and other lifestyle and cultural factors can play such a role in autoimmune diseases. It's written in a very accessible way but I found I have to read it very slowly (been weeks so far) because all of the info is blowing my mind.
A part of the book that I was flabbergasted by was the concept of the "Orchid Child" which is that 15-20% of any population in various organisms. including people, has been observed to be far more sensitive to external stresses. I have identified since college as a "Highly Sensitive Person" but did not have a glimmer of an idea how this could affect my health. And being raised in an environment where there was no emotional support at all would have been super tough for a more typical kid. In fact, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) scores have been found to have a high correlation for having an auto-immune disease.
I had literally no idea the scope and devastation of the health trials that so many women, including several dear friends such as you, have experienced. Being generally supportive in a vague sense, even listening to some of the details at times, did not help me really get it. But my eyes are opening more and more now. The ideas in the book are heavy so it's slow reading but the I think the shift in perspective is going to have a monumental effect on my life.
It's frustrating. I think not just external sexism but internalized sexism i.e. the fact that women are trained to not complain, just live quietly in pain and discomfort, is a huge factor in why so many of us have these issues and just go along to get along. Unfortunately many women start having these problems after experiencing a precipitating traumatizing event, whether physical, biological, or emotional. So for all the good that my mom did for teaching me to try to eat whole foods and minimize sugar, unfortunately it's highly likely that what I have gone through with my background set the stage for all of this.
Despite growing up with *my* mom, this is my first real introduction to how diet and other lifestyle and cultural factors can play such a role in autoimmune diseases. It's written in a very accessible way but I found I have to read it very slowly (been weeks so far) because all of the info is blowing my mind.
A part of the book that I was flabbergasted by was the concept of the "Orchid Child" which is that 15-20% of any population in various organisms. including people, has been observed to be far more sensitive to external stresses. I have identified since college as a "Highly Sensitive Person" but did not have a glimmer of an idea how this could affect my health. And being raised in an environment where there was no emotional support at all would have been super tough for a more typical kid. In fact, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) scores have been found to have a high correlation for having an auto-immune disease.