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monthly reflection on current Lapidus-related issues

February 2011

writing and illness

Check out this Guardian podcast with Sarah Manguso on her memoir Two Kinds of Decay, Robert McCrum on the stroke he described in My Year Off and a report on how reading itself might help recovery. The Reader Organisation sings the praises of reading aloud. How talking literature may help with depression and even dementia. A Liverpool academic has been examining the how Shakespeare's linguistic inventiveness sets neurons alight. A discussion of the books that can make them feel better and the writers who capture illness best.

Accompanying reading list suggests additionally
'Giving up the Ghost': A memoir by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate)
'The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly' by Jean-Dominique Bauby (HarperPerennial)
'Illness as Metaphor', and 'AIDS and Its Metaphors' by Susan Sontag (Penguin Modern Classics)
'In the Land of Pain' by Alphonse Daudet, translated by Julian Barnes (Cape)