A review by sarahmatthews
Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick

360pp. 

Fitzcarraldo Editions

Read as e-book

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In this memoir, Alice Hattrick describes her illness and that of her mother and how they were not believed, deemed hysterical by health professionals. She talks of the strain of living with an undiagnosed illness and how this puts huge pressure on them both . Alice goes into detail about how the understanding of ME/CFS has evolved and talks of the frustration felt by patients who were dismissed by doctors over a span of many years.

When diagnosis does come, it comes with mixed feelings as treatment is not straightforward and a range of medication/exercise programmes are tried, often with horrible side effects that can’t be tolerated.

I very much enjoyed the way writers such as Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are weaved in, alongside other famous figures like Florence Nightingale to illustrate her points.

Louise Bourgeois’s insomnia drawings and writings of the 1990s are discussed alongside her well known spider sculptures.

And I was really interested to read about the origins of the term “crip time” which is something that resonates with me as I live with chronic pain/fatigue. Alison Kafer coined the term and here, Alice states ‘Crip time is different from productive kinds of time, which is really just one … version of time… You do things slowly in waves rather than stages”

Kafer states that “the present takes on more ergency as the future shrinks.” This is something I’ve experienced and which will continue to be part of life I’m sure. It can be hard to explain this to family and friends and find ways to make sense of it yourself in order to ask for accommodations  at work for example. Pacing has become a kind of art over the years that I’m still getting wrong all the time!

I wasn’t totally engaged for all of this book which I find is often the case with memoirs, but when I connected I was very closely reading; none more so than the section towards the end about the pandemic and how long Covid and ME/CFS are intertwined which is essential reading.

All in all a powerful read.