The Paris Review: "The Benefits of Chronic Illness"

Andy · Mar 29, 2019

Not a recommendation.

It is too much—too pseudo-psychological and self-serving—to say that I manufactured my illness in order to become a writer. At the time I certainly felt the opposite was true, that being unwell was a hindrance to the writer I might become. With hindsight, however, it is also possible to see how I was helped. Like Proust’s asthma, ME/CFS has long been associated with languid malingering, typical of the privileged, the educated and leisured class who could afford to be ill. Regardless of its precise pathology or psychopathology—and I certainly rejected any mental aspect to it at the time—the range of symptoms, the lack of a straightforward diagnostic test or single effective treatment, the cycle of good and bad periods, its disputed nature, all make it curiously adaptive to the sufferer’s own psychological maneuvers. Dillon quotes Proust’s biographer Ronald Hayman: “It becomes hard to locate the hairline crack between the unavoidable and the theatrical.”
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https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/28/the-benefits-of-chronic-illness/

Alvin · Mar 29, 2019

I can't read the link but I have heard people claiming benefits of being homeless and other such crap. Its just an excuse to vilify the poor

Dr Carrot · Mar 29, 2019

Thought it’d be a bad piece romanticising illness or something, which it does a little, but in the end just ends up saying absolutely nothing.

“Is illness good if you’re a writer? Probably not.” Is basically the gist.

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The Paris Review: "The Benefits of Chronic Illness"

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The Paris Review: "The Benefits of Chronic Illness"

Andy Committee Member

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Dr Carrot Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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