Published in 2021
323 pages
Alice Hattrick is a writer based in London. Their recent work has been included in HEALTH: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz (2020) and Mine Searching Yours (2020). Their essays, interviews and criticism have been published by The White Review, Frieze, Art Review and Rhizome among other publications, and included in events at institutions such as ICA London (‘On Cripping’), Raven Row (‘Sick Time is Resist Time’), the Barbican (New Suns Festival) and the Goldsmiths Centre of Feminist Research. Alice is also the co-producer of Access Docs for Artists, a resource for disabled and/or chronically ill artists, curators and writers, made in collaboration with artists Leah Clements and Lizzy Rose, for which they were named on The Innovator’s List for 2020 (Artnet Intelligence Report). Alice studied at the Royal College of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art, and teaches criticism at the London College of Fashion.
What is this book about?
Ill Feelings blends memoir, medical history, biography and literary non-fiction to uncover untold case histories of medically unexplained and invisible illness. In 1995 Alice’s mother collapsed with pneumonia. Her lungs were infected, which caused flu-like symptoms: fatigue, headache, chest pain, fever. She never fully recovered and was eventually diagnosed with ME, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Then Alice got ill. Her symptoms mirrored her mother’s and appeared to have no physical cause; she received the same diagnosis a few years later. Since this time, neither of them have been well, even if, at times, they believed they were well-enough. Structured around the narrative of the author and her mother’s own ill feelings, Alice Hattrick’s collective biography of illness branches out into the records of ill health women have written about in diaries and letters. Her cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, Ruskin’s lost love Rose La Touche, and the artist Louise Bourgeois. Following in the footsteps of Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self, Ill Feelings is a moving and defiant debut from a bold new voice in narrative non-fiction with a generative, transcendent rage of its own.
