Book: There’s Nothing Wrong With Her by Kate Weinberg

SNT Gatchaman · Jul 29, 2024

Independent The Reading List: There’s Nothing Wrong With Her describes the unique hell of long Covid

After writing a bestselling mystery novel, Kate Weinberg found herself in a plotless place with no neat, obvious ending: suffering the torturous, confusing ordeal of long Covid. Now she’s turned the experience into a funny, philosophical novel – one that, as Jessie Thompson knows from experience, perfectly captures the surreal state of invisible illness

There’s Nothing Wrong with Her, published by Bloomsbury next week, is the story of Vita, a successful podcast producer who is now stranded in her new boyfriend’s bed with only her brilliantly named goldfish, Whitney Houston, for company. Vita is a name that literally means “life” – and she has been completely sapped of her life force. And as someone who was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome when I was younger – similar to long Covid in its symptoms and mystifying lack of treatment or cure – I found Weinberg’s novel perfectly captured the surreal, invisible state of being stuck between sickness and health.
Click to expand...

When Weinberg first wrote about her ordeal, she described the torture. “It feels like my whole system has been poisoned,” she said in a piece for the Daily Mail in 2021. But she went on to explore her shock at how so many of the long Covid community whom she got to know had been doubted or disbelieved. “There’s nothing wrong with her” doesn’t just mean the test results look fine. It means: she’s probably faking it. I found it embarrassing enough to be ill in a way that felt so ill defined. The idea that I could be making it up only heightened the shame. Around the time I was unwell, I remember Ricky Gervais had a joke in one of his stand-up sets about people with ME. I found it mortifying.
Click to expand...

One of the things that Vita notes in the novel is that “most people, even the ones who love you, are weird around sickness”. And chronic sickness makes people especially weird. “Something about the fact that you are stuck, that you can’t deliver the reassuring narrative of ‘getting better’ feels unnatural, disturbing,” Vita explains. We don’t want to think about it, we don’t know what to say. Maybe we don’t want to read about it. But we should. From Virginia Woolf to Susan Sontag, illness has always been a topic worth of literary investigation – gnarly and uncomfortable, but also illuminating, full of hard-won wisdom from a difficult, topsy-turvy place.
Click to expand...

SNT Gatchaman · Jul 29, 2024

Side note: "Ill defined" has probably been used before but would also be a potential title for @Jonathan Edwards' book.

Log in or Sign up

Book: There’s Nothing Wrong With Her by Kate Weinberg

SNT Gatchaman Senior Member (Voting Rights)

SNT Gatchaman Senior Member (Voting Rights)

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

Book: There’s Nothing Wrong With Her by Kate Weinberg

SNT Gatchaman Senior Member (Voting Rights)

SNT Gatchaman Senior Member (Voting Rights)

Share This Page

Useful Searches