Simon Gray, Christopher Hitchens, Joan Didion ... some of the most vivid memoirs have been accounts of illness. There is Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive, Bryony Gordon’s Mad Girl, William Leith’s Bits of Me Are Falling Apart. My illness was a convoluted one – winningly for the book, less so for me in real life – and difficult to diagnose. “I’m not sure I read very many health memoirs before I wrote my own,” she says, “but I’ve now come to love them. Cancer runs in Rentzenbrink’s family, and so she finds herself intrigued by memoirs on that topic.

Source: The Guardian March 23, 2018 09:00 UTC