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A review by mamthew42
Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses by Kristen O'Neal
5.0
In July, while working on my Disability Pride Month display, I'd search for novels about a number of individual disabilities to put up. While searching "novels about chronic pain," Kristen O'Neal's Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses came up. We didn't have it, but I was so intrigued by the title, I ordered it for us. I didn't think of it again until I was digging around for books to put on my Halloween display, so after it got checked off that display and came back, I read it.
I adore this book.
The premise is already great. 20-year-old Priya Radhakrishnan is home early from pre-med because she contracted Lyme Disease from a tick bite, and she's coming to the realization that the pain she's suffering from the disease will be with her for the rest of her life. An online friend she met through tumblr, Brigid, invites her to an online support group for people suffering from chronic illnesses. When Brigid leaves some messages that sound like she's in trouble, Priya makes the hour drive to meet her friend in person for the first time ever, only to discover that Brigid's chronic illness is lycanthropy. She's a werewolf.
On its face, Lycanthropy is such a brilliant metaphor for chronic illness. Brigid has to orient her entire life around managing her condition, locking herself away at the right time. It's a condition from folklore, so no one believes her and she has no one to talk to about it. And it really messes her body up. Before her change, she has to deal with joint pain and hair loss, while the change itself forces all her teeth out of her mouth, and afterwards she's so spent of calories that she has to eat cartoonish amounts of food to make up the deficit. She can't easily travel or meet new people because she can't allow herself to move too far away from the equipment she uses to contain the wolf or her support network. And the only possible treatment - wolfsbane - is a poison so strong that a dose off by less than a gram could kill her.
Less obvious but still impressive is Lycanthropy as a metaphor for online friendship. Priya and Brigid only knew each other from tumblr chat for years until meeting in person, and the discord support group - fittingly called "oof ouch my bones" - has its own slate of online friends even after Priya and Brigid start hanging out. With online friends, there's lots of specific details you really don't know, not even necessarily because they're trying to hide them, but because plenty of the day-to-day doesn't come up. There's a level of presentation that goes into reflecting your life online, where you might hide a lot of the warts and bruises of life, but there's a similar level of authenticity online - with people who you only know online - that in-person relationships also don't really meet. It's easier to overshare or talk about emotions with words on a screen. This means that for people with really close online friendships, there's both the offline and online version of themselves, but neither one is "incorrect." They're both you, they just might involve pieces of you that the other mode of interaction doesn't facilitate as easily. Brigid's wolf self is still Brigid, it's just a version of her that fewer people see, that's truer to some of her instincts that don't get to be aired out in public often.
An easy analogy O'Neal could have drawn was between the werewolf and the online predator, making the fact that Brigid has secrets Priya doesn't know into something dangerous and untrustworthy. I'm so glad she didn't do that. This book feels so authentic to the experiences of having online friends and meeting those friends in person. The characters in the group chat support each other through major problems in their lives, including a particularly familiar and emotional scene where they use voice chat to help talk their friend through a suicidal episode. The dialogue all feels exactly like dialogue in group chats between old internet friends, and not once did I feel like the book was misusing online speech or misreferencing a meme in a desperate attempt to feel contemporary. O'Neal is intimately familiar with online dialects, specifically strains originating on tumblr, and that familiarity brings the story a sincerity that can't be faked. The emotional elements are stronger because I've seen conversations like these play out a million times on a hundred different platforms over a decade and a half. The internet's in our bones, now, but it's still so rare to find a novel this true to that aspect of our lives.
I also love Brigid and Priya's relationship generally. They're close but also unfamiliar, with a simultaneous comfort and discomfort with each other that's a hard balance to strike, but O'Neal does it well. Seeing both the online and offline sides of the characters fleshes their personalities out much more easily than in similar stories. They're both likeable and easy to get invested in, which makes the novel's conflicts hit that much harder. There's a point in the story when they're arguing, and so much tension left my body when they hugged. It's that kind of a book.
I'd at least recommend this book to anyone who's dealt with chronic illnesses and anyone who's had a lot of online friends. It's got werewolves, too, so if that's your thing it's worth reading for that as well. Just a great time.
I adore this book.
The premise is already great. 20-year-old Priya Radhakrishnan is home early from pre-med because she contracted Lyme Disease from a tick bite, and she's coming to the realization that the pain she's suffering from the disease will be with her for the rest of her life. An online friend she met through tumblr, Brigid, invites her to an online support group for people suffering from chronic illnesses. When Brigid leaves some messages that sound like she's in trouble, Priya makes the hour drive to meet her friend in person for the first time ever, only to discover that Brigid's chronic illness is lycanthropy. She's a werewolf.
On its face, Lycanthropy is such a brilliant metaphor for chronic illness. Brigid has to orient her entire life around managing her condition, locking herself away at the right time. It's a condition from folklore, so no one believes her and she has no one to talk to about it. And it really messes her body up. Before her change, she has to deal with joint pain and hair loss, while the change itself forces all her teeth out of her mouth, and afterwards she's so spent of calories that she has to eat cartoonish amounts of food to make up the deficit. She can't easily travel or meet new people because she can't allow herself to move too far away from the equipment she uses to contain the wolf or her support network. And the only possible treatment - wolfsbane - is a poison so strong that a dose off by less than a gram could kill her.
Less obvious but still impressive is Lycanthropy as a metaphor for online friendship. Priya and Brigid only knew each other from tumblr chat for years until meeting in person, and the discord support group - fittingly called "oof ouch my bones" - has its own slate of online friends even after Priya and Brigid start hanging out. With online friends, there's lots of specific details you really don't know, not even necessarily because they're trying to hide them, but because plenty of the day-to-day doesn't come up. There's a level of presentation that goes into reflecting your life online, where you might hide a lot of the warts and bruises of life, but there's a similar level of authenticity online - with people who you only know online - that in-person relationships also don't really meet. It's easier to overshare or talk about emotions with words on a screen. This means that for people with really close online friendships, there's both the offline and online version of themselves, but neither one is "incorrect." They're both you, they just might involve pieces of you that the other mode of interaction doesn't facilitate as easily. Brigid's wolf self is still Brigid, it's just a version of her that fewer people see, that's truer to some of her instincts that don't get to be aired out in public often.
An easy analogy O'Neal could have drawn was between the werewolf and the online predator, making the fact that Brigid has secrets Priya doesn't know into something dangerous and untrustworthy. I'm so glad she didn't do that. This book feels so authentic to the experiences of having online friends and meeting those friends in person. The characters in the group chat support each other through major problems in their lives, including a particularly familiar and emotional scene where they use voice chat to help talk their friend through a suicidal episode. The dialogue all feels exactly like dialogue in group chats between old internet friends, and not once did I feel like the book was misusing online speech or misreferencing a meme in a desperate attempt to feel contemporary. O'Neal is intimately familiar with online dialects, specifically strains originating on tumblr, and that familiarity brings the story a sincerity that can't be faked. The emotional elements are stronger because I've seen conversations like these play out a million times on a hundred different platforms over a decade and a half. The internet's in our bones, now, but it's still so rare to find a novel this true to that aspect of our lives.
I also love Brigid and Priya's relationship generally. They're close but also unfamiliar, with a simultaneous comfort and discomfort with each other that's a hard balance to strike, but O'Neal does it well. Seeing both the online and offline sides of the characters fleshes their personalities out much more easily than in similar stories. They're both likeable and easy to get invested in, which makes the novel's conflicts hit that much harder. There's a point in the story when they're arguing, and so much tension left my body when they hugged. It's that kind of a book.
I'd at least recommend this book to anyone who's dealt with chronic illnesses and anyone who's had a lot of online friends. It's got werewolves, too, so if that's your thing it's worth reading for that as well. Just a great time.