Ill Feelings: stories of unexplained illness

Background
Alice Hattrick's mother became ill with ME/CFS when Alice was eight; diagnosis took two years. Alice also developed ME/CFS as a child, and remains ill. Ill Feelings reflects on Alice's experirnces, and those of other disabled writers, and the the attitudes of the medical profession and society in general on poorly understood or unexplained illness.

Synopsis
"In 1995 Alice’s mother collapsed with pneumonia. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Their symptoms mirrored their mother’s and appeared to have no physical cause; they received the same diagnosis a few years later. Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary non-fiction to uncover both of their case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters. Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin’s lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale. Suffused with a generative, transcendent rage, Alice Hattrick’s genre-bending debut is a moving and defiant exploration of life with a medically unexplained illness." (source: Fitzcarraldo Editions)

Reception

 * Feb 2022, Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick book review - Times Literary Supplement
 * Sep 2021, Kirsty Hendry responds to Alice Hattrick's new book Ill Feelings - MAP Magazine review by a disabled reviewer
 * Ill Feelings - Feature by The White Review

Online presence

 * Website
 * Twitter
 * Facebook
 * YouTube

Learn more

 * Chapter 1: Ill Feelings extract - Scribe publications