UK writer with ME Susanna Clarke - press articles

[Lou B Lou]

New short essay in the Guardian, which ends with a foray into mind–body land.

Susanna Clarke: ‘I had been ill for 11 years. I felt like I was about to fall off the world’

One hundred years after Virginia Woolf explored the limitations of language in On Being Ill, the Piranesi author reflects on the power of storytelling to shape our experience of sickness

www.theguardian.com

Oh for goodness sake - Thanks Susanna - for your Undermining of every ME sufferer in the country - for your pontificating to the Charleston Festival audience and Guardian readers about ill people writing (when so many pwME can barely write at all anymore, some can't even read anymore),
and about stories (as if we haven't already been fed to the gills with the 'stories are more important than medicine/life/death' narrative),
and for putting it out there that we are stuck in a terrified loop of (unconsciously) reacting to danger - and that's why we have been sick for 5/10/20/40 years.

Jeez. Talk about tone deaf. Talk about self-absorbed prattling on .... Susannah seems to live in her own protected literary bubble, sublimely oblivious of the 100s of 1,000s of severely sick ME patients and the abuses they are subjected to. Sublimely unaware of the ME deaths. Just immersed in a bubble of herself, and her career, and her literary reputation. And she's jumped on the braintraining cult ideology bandwagon to pad out her talk to *fascinate* and titillate her audience at an Arts Festival.


Susanna Clarke:

"... There is a bunch of interrelated therapies, all fairly recent, that share an interest in narrative. They are pain reprocessing, somatic tracking, polyvagal theory and others. The underlying idea is that in some people – and I stress some people – chronic illness might look like this: a very ancient and primitive part of the brain and nervous system believes it has detected danger, possibly a tiger or something like that, and so it produces pain or a whole range of symptoms in an effort to get the sufferer to close down and protect herself. The nervous system does this very effectively and it can carry on doing it for decades. It is really very inventive. I feel that mine ought to be eligible for some sort of prize.

It comes to this. A story you have on some level believed – that the world is fraught with danger – can be countered by a different story. Yes, the world is fraught with danger, but not everywhere, and not always, not here in this place and not now in this moment. You are safe.

So this is my narrative now, the story of how I got ill – and perhaps, if I pay careful attention to it, I will be able to retrace my steps through the labyrinth of my own body and return to safety."

This essay was originally commissioned for Charleston festival.

Susanna Clarke: ‘I had been ill for 11 years. I felt like I was about to fall off the world’

One hundred years after Virginia Woolf explored the limitations of language in On Being Ill, the Piranesi author reflects on the power of storytelling to shape our experience of sickness

www.theguardian.com

 

[Eleanor]

The reasoning seems to be that people will insist on having some kind of narrative explanation for your illness, so you might as well pick one with a metaphor that you find personally appealing.

 

[MrMagoo]

People be really focussed on narratives of late.

 

[Axel]

"what the sufferer experiences may be as much emotional as it is physical – it may even have a spiritual component. It is very difficult in my experience to separate the different strands."
Ok, but do it, please.

Involving Virginia Woolf strikes me as rather uninformative. Given that Woolf took her own life, what can we deduce from this about the healing power of storytelling?

 

[Felis Catus]

So it's not misinformation and pseudoscience, it's narrative?

 

[Lou B Lou]

"what the sufferer experiences may be as much emotional as it is physical – it may even have a spiritual component. It is very difficult in my experience to separate the different strands."
Ok, but do it, please.

Involving Virginia Woolf strikes me as rather uninformative. Given that Woolf took her own life, what can we deduce from this about the healing power of storytelling?

Susanna Clarke:
"what the sufferer experiences may be as much emotional as it is physical – it may even have a spiritual component. It is very difficult in my experience to separate the different strands."

Just a fatuous and self indulgent statement! Sod any supposed 'spiritual component* to a stigmatised and vilified disabling illness. Who the hell does Susanna Clarke think she is?

Tell that to pwME who are denied enough homecare to live like actual human beings, who go without food because too sick to reach the kitchen, who starve to death in NHS hospitals because of the obstinate and determined continuing gaslighting of all ME patients, but especially the most sick.

 

[Utsikt]

Susanna Clarke:
"what the sufferer experiences may be as much emotional as it is physical – it may even have a spiritual component. It is very difficult in my experience to separate the different strands."

No dualism at all..