Hot Milk (2016)

"Hot Milk is about Rose, who has confusing and debilitating health problems, and her daughter Sofia, who finds her mother exasperating but seems perpetually tied to her, and even sometimes experiences apparent sympathy pains for her. The novel sees them travel to a peculiar clinic in Spain, where Rose is supposedly going to be cured of the cause-less paralysis that has confined her to a wheelchair by a strange man named Gómez. The novel is a dense, literary exploration of Sofia’s interior life, but it also provides some fascinating and tragic insights into the plight of the hypochondriac. For instance: Rose has remortgaged her house in order to be able to pay the 25,000 euro fee to attend the clinic. Given that she has no diagnosis, this seems exceptionally steep, but it is representative of the desperate lengths people will go to get relief when no other answers are forthcoming. I do think that hypochondria can be part of, or even mask, other psychological or mental issues. Something the comedian Marc Maron says in his standup comes to mind: “My father was a doctor, which means I was a hypochondriac. How else are you going to get their attention?” For him, his hypochondria was connected to his issues in his relationship with his father and it was part of how he asserted himself. Jane Austen’s mother seems to have used her fluctuating health problems to keep her family constantly surrounding her, fussing over her and moulding their lives to fit hers. It can be a means of exerting control, which I think is what the character of Rose wants from it. It can even be compared to factitious disorder imposed on another , what was previously called Munchausen syndrome by proxy, in which a caregiver will deliberately neglect their charge or make them sick so as to be able to seek medical assistance and receive attention. But in its simplest form, I think hypochondria is a very internal and individual condition, not necessarily defined by its reception by others. And every hypochondriac I have ever spoken to has expressed the desire never to think these thoughts again. For myself, if I could flick a switch and never worry about my health again, I would."