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

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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.
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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.
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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.
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There was an interview with Kate Weinberg on New Zealand radio this morning.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/prog...g-finding-the-funny-side-of-invisible-illness
She notes that she is much better but is not fully recovered.

The book might be good, but I think I would find it a difficult read as I'd be constantly on the alert for positions on post-infection disease that I don't agree with. I was like that during the interview too. And there was quite a lot of ambiguity that could concern, if that is your mindset. Things like referring to the illness as 'the pit', a la the Lightning Process, and the expressed hope that her book will help people who are stuck, not just with chronic illness but stuck in things like grief too, how it will help people to move on. And there was the suggestion that writing the book helped her recovery (rather than recovering then enabling the book writing).

I think part of the problem is that the sort of people who write books based on their chronic illness are often looking for metaphors, and want an engaging story arc 'protagonist suffers, protagonist overcomes the challenge as a result of her own hard work and determination, protagonist finds value in having gone through such a challenging time'. I guess, actually, that tendency is a human one, it makes a good story, a much better one than 'protagonist suffers, protagonist keeps suffering, protagonist finds a few ways to make things less bad, but protagonist keeps suffering'.

There was talk of various things that helped with her recovery, positive thinking, vitamin B3.

The book is promoted as 'finding the funny side of invisible illness'. I didn't hear anything funny in the interview. The reviewer in the first post found the pet goldfish to be 'brilliantly named' as Whitney Houston and, when asked about the name in the interview, Weinberg says the name was to signal to the reader that the book would be a good time, not depressing. But, I don't get the joke. She says that the goldfish is a metaphor for her brain, how she was constantly forgetting things.

As I said, the book may be fine and Kate Weinberg came across as someone trying to be honest and trying to help rather than harm. Others have said before, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, there should be a ban on people writing about their experience of post-infection illness and ME/CFS, perhaps even being interviewed publicly, until 5 years after the illness onset. I think there is something to recommend such a policy. It wouldn't help sell books though.
 
https://www.unibooks.co.nz/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=180802
Excerpts from a promotional blurb about the book, bolding mine:

'The best thing you'll read this year' KILEY REID 'So beautiful' SARAH JESSICA PARKER 'One of those books I will read again and again' JOJO MOYES 'Moving, absorbing, evocative' SARA COLLINS A crackling, comical, tender, and highly original novel about mental health, the certainties of medicine, buried trauma, love, death and time lost in the crushing - and comical - hopes of modern life

_______________________________________________________ Vita Woods is on the brink. She has a good job and a successful doctor boyfriend, Max, with whom the sex is great and the chat sufficient; a vivacious and charming sister Gracie, her verbal sparring partner and best friend for life; and she's even got a goldfish called Whitney Houston, who brightens her days by showing her she's not the only one going round in circles. Because it's the days that are Vita's problem. Vita is not leaving the house. In fact, Vita rarely exits the basement apartment where she lives, since Vita is in "The Pit" - a place of deep exhaustion and semi-consciousness where she spends much of her time, dead to the world and to herself. She has been sick for months, with an illness that no doctor, not even Max, can medically diagnose.

One day an unexpected courier delivery forces Vita upstairs, into the light - and into a chance encounter with her neighbours upstairs. Suddenly, Vita finds herself faced with an even trickier dilemma. She likes her new friends; she'll even sneak upstairs to see them while Max is out, against all medical advice but something about her "condition" is nagging at the borders of her mind. After all, what is a house-bound girl to do when she can't keep the light, her new friendships, or - worst of all - her memories out? The problem might be Vita herself but as far as anyone can prove... there's nothing wrong with her. 'Encompasses so many things: a whole life - sorrows, damage, hopes' RICHARD CURTIS 'Surreal, magical, totally original' SATHNAM SANGHERA 'Deep and dark and beautiful'
 
Hutan said:
There was an interview with Kate Weinberg on New Zealand radio this morning.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/prog...g-finding-the-funny-side-of-invisible-illness
She notes that she is much better but is not fully recovered.

The book might be good, but I think I would find it a difficult read as I'd be constantly on the alert for positions on post-infection disease that I don't agree with. I was like that during the interview too. And there was quite a lot of ambiguity that could concern, if that is your mindset. Things like referring to the illness as 'the pit', a la the Lightning Process, and the expressed hope that her book will help people who are stuck, not just with chronic illness but stuck in things like grief too, how it will help people to move on. And there was the suggestion that writing the book helped her recovery (rather than recovering then enabling the book writing).

I think part of the problem is that the sort of people who write books based on their chronic illness are often looking for metaphors, and want an engaging story arc 'protagonist suffers, protagonist overcomes the challenge as a result of her own hard work and determination, protagonist finds value in having gone through such a challenging time'. I guess, actually, that tendency is a human one, it makes a good story, a much better one than 'protagonist suffers, protagonist keeps suffering, protagonist finds a few ways to make things less bad, but protagonist keeps suffering'.

There was talk of various things that helped with her recovery, positive thinking, vitamin B3.

The book is promoted as 'finding the funny side of invisible illness'. I didn't hear anything funny in the interview. The reviewer in the first post found the pet goldfish to be 'brilliantly named' as Whitney Houston and, when asked about the name in the interview, Weinberg says the name was to signal to the reader that the book would be a good time, not depressing. But, I don't get the joke. She says that the goldfish is a metaphor for her brain, how she was constantly forgetting things.

As I said, the book may be fine and Kate Weinberg came across as someone trying to be honest and trying to help rather than harm. Others have said before, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, there should be a ban on people writing about their experience of post-infection illness and ME/CFS, perhaps even being interviewed publicly, until 5 years after the illness onset. I think there is something to recommend such a policy. It wouldn't help sell books though.
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Erm, Whitney Houston died by drowning, with signs of heart disease and cocaine in her system. It doesn’t make me think the book will be a “good time” it makes me think the author is an indelicate putz. Ha ha Whitney drowned but this Whitney is a fish lol.

Edit - I’ve read the write up “teaser” thing and it reads like a 16 year old trying to do a Marian Keyes after reading Rachel’s Holiday. So she lives in the “pit” basement with her Dr Boyfriend but wants to go upstairs secretly to “the light” against medical advice… wow there’s metaphors and then there’s whatever that is. An attempt at metaphor? She sounds full Garner. It’s a no from me.
 
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