Overview

From the inaugural winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, a riveting exploration of illness and medicine that imagines a more humane form of care ""What was wrong with them? That's what we wanted to know."" So begins Jonathan Gleason's prizewinning collection of essays on the human lives behind the corporate, legal, and cultural practices that shape disease. Drawing on his experiences as a medical interpreter and patient, and on a decade of historical research, he illuminates a stunning range of topics, including the racial dimensions of organ donation, the past and present of the AIDS crisis, the troubled relationship between state violence and mental illness, and the trial of a doctor accused of murdering his patients. Gleason shows how medicine is influenced, compromised, and enlivened by the cultural narratives, historical contexts, and complicated people who practice it. In her foreword, Meghan O'Rourke, judge of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, writes that ""illness is often framed as a crisis to endure or overcome on the way back to a restored 'intact' self. But as Gleason's work reminds us, illness is also a way of knowing. His essays speak to the precarious beauty of that knowing, and to the ways it connects us—to history, to culture, to one another.""

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9780300282948

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Queer, lucid and brilliant, Jonathan Gleason’s prose is not just a guide for falling ill but for navigating—and changing—our ableist society. Vulnerable and poetic, this is a stunning literary debut from an important new author.”—Steven W. Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass and The Overseer Class

“Enlightening and beautifully written. . . . Sparkles with clarity and precision, rendering complicated concepts accessible and stimulating. . . . A triumph.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “A stunning debut. Gleason renders the many vulnerabilities of the body with exquisite prose and probing intelligence. I kept asking myself how a book about illness could be so pleasurable to read—the answer is that it was written with a profoundly humane and relentless curiosity, belief that no amount of suffering precludes beauty.”—Melissa Febos, bestselling author of The Dry Season “Queer, lucid and brilliant, Jonathan Gleason’s prose is not just a guide for falling ill but for navigating—and changing—our ableist society. Vulnerable and poetic, this is a stunning literary debut from an important new author.”—Steven W. Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass and The Overseer Class “Field Guide to Falling Ill is an authoritative, well-wrought, and consistently surprising collection from an unexpected narrator. Gleason’s articulation of life as a young gay man exploring the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic is riveting.”—Kerry Howley, author of Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs “Jonathan Gleason’s Field Guide to Falling Ill powerfully expands our understanding of illness, laying bare the intimate and often wrenching human stories interwoven with the practice of medicine. This collection is not just a chronicle of ailments but a meditation on the fragility and resilience of the human body, as well as a map traversing medicine’s treacherous domains and complex histories.”—John D’Agata, coauthor of The Lifespan of a Fact

“A stunning debut. Gleason renders the many vulnerabilities of the body with exquisite prose and probing intelligence. I kept asking myself how a book about illness could be so pleasurable to read—the answer is that it was written with a profoundly humane and relentless curiosity, belief that no amount of suffering precludes beauty.”—Melissa Febos, bestselling author of The Dry Season “Queer, lucid and brilliant, Jonathan Gleason’s prose is not just a guide for falling ill but for navigating—and changing—our ableist society. Vulnerable and poetic, this is a stunning literary debut from an important new author.”—Steven W. Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass and The Overseer Class “Field Guide to Falling Ill is an authoritative, well-wrought, and consistently surprising collection from an unexpected narrator. Gleason’s articulation of life as a young gay man exploring the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic is riveting.”—Kerry Howley, author of Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs “Jonathan Gleason’s Field Guide to Falling Ill powerfully expands our understanding of illness, laying bare the intimate and often wrenching human stories interwoven with the practice of medicine. This collection is not just a chronicle of ailments but a meditation on the fragility and resilience of the human body, as well as a map traversing medicine’s treacherous domains and complex histories.”—John D’Agata, coauthor of The Lifespan of a Fact

Author Information

Jonathan Gleason is an award-winning writer and a lecturer at the University of Chicago, where he teaches creative writing. Meghan O’Rourke is the judge for the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize, editor of the Yale Review, and the author of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness.

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