On Life-Writing About Illness

This talk reflects on life-writing as a way of understanding the experience of illness. The speaker draws from theorists on narrative medicine and life writing to discuss the fast growing fields of medical and health humanities. The discussion of life-writing hopes to create a reflective space where we can try to imagine the benefits and contributions of experiential accounts beyond the function of catharsis, to think about the transformative power of life-writing for engaging with the complexity of disease. Drawing from instances in different memoirs, ideas of resistance to stigma and genre specific conventions will be discussed too.