About

Through critical thesis and book-length memoir, my doctoral research examines how chronic illness shapes both the ethics and formal structures of life writing. The project engages with the dual nature of illness writing as an “ethical pharmakon”—both a poison and a cure for the writer—and examines how specific “invisible” chronic conditions such as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and Depression influence formal characteristics of narrative. Rather than distorting narrative form, I explore how illness might constitute form itself, raising questions about self-exposure, privacy, and the commodification of personal experience.

The critical component includes a comparative analysis of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) alongside contemporary illness texts by Polly Atkin, Abi Palmer, Sonia Huber, and others, tracing how shifts in cultural conceptualisation of mental and bodily illness impact narrative forms. In reading Burton’s fragmented, encyclopaedic work as a proto-life-writing text, I examine how historical and contemporary illness narratives respond to the dislocation and interruption inherent in chronic conditions.

The creative component—a fragmented memoir—explores my own experiences with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and depression, alongside the intergenerational legacy of illness in my family, particularly my maternal grandmother’s struggles with mental illness, culminating in her 1977 suicide. Employing fragmentation, gaps, and disjointed chronology, I reflect the lived—often incoherent—experience of chronic illness, where symptoms, memory, and selfhood fracture. This project also investigates how specific conditions like EDS and depression manifest formally in my writing, drawing on feminist, disability, and bio-political perspectives to creatively examine how illness and crip time (Kafer) challenge the norms of coherence and continuity in storytelling time.

Finally, this research questions the concept of cure—not as a resolution but as a cultural construct that shapes and complicates our understanding of illness, selfhood, and recovery. Through this dual focus on ethics and form, this research contributes fresh insights to life writing, medical humanities, and disability studies.