A review by laura_sackton
Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick

It took me a long time to read this. It’s a meandering book about chronic illness, Hattrick’s life with ME/CFS, as well as their mother’s, and it often goes deep down into the medical weeds. There are long descriptions of studies, various doctors, cult-like cures and other remedies they and their mother have tried. Their writing is somewhat dry and very detailed, with lots of information about the history of these illnesses with unknown causes, and long passages about medical conferences, research protocols, various scandals with various doctors, etc. 

All through this there is also the personal story of Hattrick’s own life, the ways in which their illness has defined their life since childhood, their own ill feelings, what it means and feels like to be a person in the world who is sick, who is ill, who has ill feelings in a world that does not want to look at ill feelings. They write about their closeness with their mother, and how they share the language of illness, about years and years of not being listened to by doctors, of not being taken seriously, about all the ways in which medicine and health care are gendered and therefore people who read or present as female are often ignored. 

There is also this fascinating strand of history, the history of hysteria and other illnesses that have been made up and/or described as social, in the realm of mental health, as having psychological rather than biological causes. And they write about four ill women in particular: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alice James, Virginia Woolf, and Florence Nightingale. I loved these parts the best. They write about how these women experienced illness, the struggles they had to be listened to and taken seriously (especially by the men in their lives), the relationships they had with other women, and their queerness, because they all lived queer lives. 

I loved reading about these women, about their relationships with illness and art and queerness, and thinking about how their lives still affect women and queer people today, how much of what they went through in the late 19th and early 20th century is still happening today—women and queer people being ignored, treated as invisible, having to make up their own remedies, build new structures in which to live sick lives. 

It meanders a lot and was a bit too dense in places for me. Sometimes it felt repetitive. But overall I did really enjoy it, and am glad I read it. In the end, Hattrick talks about covid and long covid and the ways that long covid is similar to ME/CFS, though there isn’t enough research into the latter yet. And they talk about sick time, crip time, the ways in which they are reaching toward an un-cure, how the idea of an un-cure—living their life as disabled and ill and not falling into the ableist cycle of symptom, diagnosis, cure—is freeing and liberating. I really appreciated their thoughts on what it means to move in sick time and how during the early days of the pandemic it felt like the world was coming toward them, starting to move in sick time, even though that has changed since. It gave me a lot to think about in terms of queerness, gender, sickness, non-normative lives, etc.