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Sick lit panel at Northwestern 10-15-13

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Or more specifically: “The Chronic Question: Writing about Illness.” Moderated by chronicbabe Jenni Prokopy, and featuring Paula Kamen, Sandi Wisenberg, and Laurie Edwards.

6:00-7:15 pm
Annie May Swift, 1920 Campus Drive- 1st floor auditorium
Evanston, IL

For more info, see Center for Writing Arts website

This event is FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. No reservations are needed; it’s on a first-come-first-seated basis. Q&A and book signing too follow. Co-sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies

'All in My Head' riding on substantive coattails of author Laurie Edwards

Laurie Edwards, health blogger and author of the fantastically researched new book, In the Kingdom of the Sick: A Social History of Chronic Illness in America, has given some nice shout outs to my work in All in My Head — both in her book and on the PR trail.

She mentioned my book’s analysis of the women’s health movement of the 1960s and its blind spot for chronic pain while being grilled in a “Fresh Air” interview on NPR (while, dare I say, keeping her cool better than Woody Allen when Gross needled him about Soon Yi).

Also last week, in a story on Laurie’s book in USA Today, I was interviewed about my term, “the Tired Girls,”  to describe women living a secret double-life of pain or fatigue.The writer, Kim Painter, cites from Laurie’s book:

The Tired Girl stands for so much that society disdains: weakness, exhaustion, dependence, unreliability, and the inability to get better.

I also posted a Ms. blog interview with Laurie about her focus on women and chronic illness, and a longer, later version for Shewrites.com.

Featured Book for Lectures: 'All in My Head'

“All in My Head” initial book cover.

All in My Head is a black comedy, a candid memoir and an informed journalistic report. It’s about my often absurd struggles to try to cure (but ultimately manage) one long 15-year migraine (now diagnosed as “chronic daily headache”), through odysseys through the extremes of both Western and alternative medicine.

Meanwhile, the book stops to address different “big picture” issues involved, such as framing chronic pain as a “women’s issue.” This book is the first one written on “chronic daily headache,” a constant or near-constant headache, that affects about 4-5 percent of the population (and about 10 percent of women of childbearing age).

SALON.COM (4-05): “Her book connects the dots on this issue of women and chronic pain in a way nobody else has done.” 

THE WOMEN’S REVIEW OF BOOKS (5-06) describes the book as “exhaustively researched, comprehensive in its cultural analysis, effectively organized, engagingly written, and, well, a riot.”

Order the book here

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