A New, Unbearably Honest Kind of Writing

Illness and literature have frequently been bedfellows. Tuberculosis, for example, shortened the life and influenced the work of authors as varied as Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka, and the Brontë sisters. We can’t know what In Search of Lost Time would have looked like if a variety of ailments had not left Marcel Proust in his bed during his youth. To infer that sickness begets literature would be misleading—perhaps even dangerous. But once in a while, it forces a writer to undergo a radical artistic transformation—one so serious that they might reconsider what books can do.