Sanatorium

"This is a fascinating book in so many different ways. Partly, the subject matter, and partly the way it’s written. It’s about Abi’s experiences of chronic pain and illness. We share a connective tissue disorder, so it’s particularly interesting to me because of that. It’s about seeking a water cure in a lot of different ways, and also about living conditions—not something we hear about often in books about illness, or books in general. That a lot of the book is about how being in warm water really eases Abi’s pain. But the flat she lives in, in London, doesn’t have a bath. So she buys an inflatable bathtub online to try to manage her pain, but a lot of strange and peculiar things arise out of that bath. The flat is kind of rejecting the bath. “There’s extraordinary writing out there, and extraordinary writing that is created under great duress” It begins when she gets funding to go to a very fancy sanatorium to take a water cure. And how she writes about that is very beautiful, very extraordinary, very illuminating. In amongst all that, there is thinking about miraculous cures, saints, rapturous experiences. So there are these different strands that weave together. I love this book, because it’s a bit like Sonya Huber’s book—and Esme’s as well—in their very form, they capture something of the experience. A kind of strange, dislocating, fragmenting experience of living with illness."