A Matter of Appearance: A Memoir

“Instead of turning her pain into a performance, Wells made her illness into the basis for solidarity, finding in the histories of the mad and the ill material for her protest against the contemporary medical system... Charcot’s patients, Freud’s patients, Balanchine’s dancers, and herself all become examples of a type—women made to pose and perform their suffering for authorities who they hope will alleviate this pain, or elevate it.”
— The New Yorker

“Gorgeously written and brilliantly argued, A Matter of Appearance uses chronic illness as a lever to investigate the life of a body. It’s complex, inconclusive, and incredibly clear-eyed. Moving fluidly between histories of psychoanalysis, desire, ambition, and pathology, Wells reminds us of the liminal state we all live in between sickness and health.”
— Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia and Summer of Hate

"A Matter of Appearance is what the genre of 'sick lit' is missing: Wells ties up the loose ends between the rich history of hysteria, consumption, and modern stories of autoimmunity, while resisting the maudlin. Absolutely dazzling."
— Lena Dunham, author of Not That Kind of Girl

“A Matter of Appearance brilliantly gives language to the body, and measures the distance between the kinds of narratives that tend to be projected onto women’s bodies and the stories these bodies are actually telling. Perceptive, fascinating, superb.”
— Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters

A dazzling memoir of chronic illness that explores the fraught intersection between pain, language, and gender, a debut author.

Emily Wells, a former ballerina, spent her childhood dancing through intense, whole-body pain she assumed was normal for someone used to pushing her body to its limits. For years, no doctor could tell Wells what was wrong with her, or they told her it was “all in her head.” It was only in college that she learned the name for the illness she had been suffering from all her life: Behcet’s Disease, a rare congenital disorder causing blood vessel inflammation throughout the body, arthritis, and swelling of the brain.

In A Matter of Appearance, Wells, now a professor of creative writing at UC Irvine, traces her journey as she tries to understand and define this specific and personal pain, internally and externally. She draws on the critical works of Freud, Sontag, and others to explore the intersection between gender, pain, and language, tracing a line from the “hysteria patients” documented at the Salpêtrière Hospital in nineteenth-century Paris through to the contemporary New Age healers of Los Angeles and beyond. At the crux of this is the dilemma of how to express in words an experience that is both private and public, subjective, and quantifiable.

A work of crystalline beauty and razorlike insight, A Matter of Appearance introduces a much needed millennial voice to the literature of illness.

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