The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

"It’s a well-written, well-researched, and painfully honest story about working through complex medical conditions. I think like Quiet in a way, it also helps bring further into the mainstream something that people with chronic health conditions have been saying forever: take us and our pain seriously, but don’t you dare define our whole being by it. O’Rourke also does a wonderful job of integrating her personal narrative with criticisms of how cultures comprehend illness, as well as the unequal politics of treatment. That’s what makes it my kind of self-help book: it’s not just things you can do, but how broader perceptions and actions are linked to the transformation. That’s an interesting question. There must be a good book out there on the value of awareness for changing conditions. I know some of the book builds on arguments in Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor from 1978, which has been somewhat widely read, so I would guess that like many things this is not a straight line of progress but a constant chipping away. Part of it is also that habits of assumption are deeply engrained, and, while awareness can make a difference, it may not always hit the depth of the habit. That’s why we keep working on ourselves beyond reading the book."