READING LIST
Essays, fiction, non-fiction, memoir, and poetry relating to the body, illness, pain, disability, trauma, and more.
The Undying by Anne Boyer
The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang
Constellations by Sinéad Gleeson
I Choose Elena by Lucia Osborne-Crowley
Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth
Happening by Annie Ernaux
Inferno by Catherine Cho
Sick by Porochista Khakpour
Your Voice In My Head by Emma Forrest
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
Notes to Self by Emilie Pine
Ask Me About My Uterus by Abby Norman
Hunger by Roxane Gay
Hysteria by Katerina Bryant
Places I’ve Taken My Body: Essays by Molly McCully Brown
The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey
Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick
Non Fiction/essay
Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Pain Woman Takes Your Keys by Sonya Huber
Crippled by Frances Ryan
Invisible by Michele Lent Hirsch
Doing Harm by Maya Dusenbery
Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer
Health Justice Now by Timothy Faust
Exposure by Olivia Sudjic
Disability Aesthetics by Tobin Anthony Siebers
Bodyminds reimagined by Sami Schalk
What Her Body Thought by Susan Griffin
The Rejected Body by Susan Wendell
When The Sick Rule The World by Dodie Bellamy
The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry
Brilliant Imperfection by Eli Clare
Sick Woman Theory by Johanna Hedva
Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag
Life in the sick-room by Harriet Martineau
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison
Conditioner by Liz Barr
Fiction
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottesa Moshfegh
Please Read This Leaflet Carefully by Karen Havelin
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Hotel World by Ali Smith
Poetry/other
Tender Points by Amy Berkowitz
Sanatorium by Abi Palmer
Rheuma by William Gee
In the Sick Hour by Jane Hartshorn & Kaiya Waerea
Curses, Curses by Kirstie Millar & Alice Blackstock
Metamorphosis by Charlotte Lunn
Anthologies
Criptiques edited by Caitlin Wood
A Queer Anthology of Sickness published by Pilot Press
Cusp: Feminist Writing on Bodies, Myth & Magic published by Ache magazine
Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century edited by Alice Wong
On Bodies published by 3 of Cups Press