There’s Nothing Wrong with Her explores themes of self-enlightenment and healing, while another new book on illness at the start of the pandemic, Small Rain, teaches us about community.
In There’s Nothing Wrong with Her, the second novel from Kate Weinberg, a young woman named Vita lies in bed in her London flat. She exerts herself as little as she can, but it’s impossible to fully avoid “the weak, trembly feeling.”
Left alone with her thoughts while her doctor boyfriend is away at work, she wonders, “What if I’m stuck like this for years, a spineless sack of dust … an old invalid in the prime of my life, reduced to rubble after a short walk to the front door. What if I can never go for a brisk walk again, never swim, never drive, never get to have a family. Never, never, never.”
These spiraling thoughts will be familiar to many suffering with Long COVID. As I read this passage, lying in bed to manage my own symptoms, I felt a profound sense of relief. Finally, someone was writing about what I and so many millions of other people have experienced.
Though some writers responded quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic by writing novels depicting the early stages of the pandemic (Elizabeth Strout, Lucy by the Sea), and others have continued to use those early months as a backdrop for their characters’ personal crises (Alison Espach, The Wedding People), few fiction writers have seriously considered the medical effects of COVID-19. More than four years into the pandemic, There’s Nothing Wrong with Her is the first novel from a mainstream American publishing company to explore the experience of Long COVID. Hopefully, more will follow to further explore — and educate readers about — the nature of this illness, but for now, Weinberg’s novel stands alone.
This lack of representation shouldn’t come as a surprise to disabled readers. Taking The Atlantic’s list of 136 Great American Novels as an example of this issue, Emma Copley Eisenberg pointed out in a recent article that the list “highlighted characters of diverse races, ethnic backgrounds, gender identities, and sexualities, those with disabilities were virtually absent.”
While no statistics pinpoint the number of novels that include characters with disabilities, a 2023 survey of the publishing industry that only 17% of people in this community had a disability, as compared to 29% of the general American public. Without more advocates within the industry, it’s no surprise that narratives focusing on disabled characters haven’t flourished. And while it takes time for books to be written and go through the publishing process, the lack of attention to Long COVID in both fiction and televised media is glaring given the preponderance of the illness. (A recent report in Nature Medicine estimated that 400 million people worldwide have Long COVID.)
It’s important that fiction represent disabled people not only so that we can see our experiences depicted in art, but also because studies have shown that people absorb health information better through stories than through lists or lectures. Fiction could serve as an invaluable tool for explaining the severity of Long COVID — and other chronic illnesses — to those who haven’t experienced them personally.
In There’s Nothing Wrong with Her, Weinberg draws on her own experience of Long COVID to depict both the physical strain of the illness and its psychological effects, including aphasia and cognitive dysfunction, or “brain fog.” In the novel’s most striking passages, Weinberg uses fractured language to describe Vita’s experience of “The Pit,” a metaphor for post-exertional malaise (PEM), a common symptom of Long COVID and myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME.) Vita describes:
A feeling of extreme weakness like I might dis a p p e a r.
Every cell is squeezed dry leaving just a
frail web of nerves
the skeleton of a leaf.
An itch on my nose. No energy to lift my hand.
But while Weinberg’s detailed evocation of certain symptoms will be meaningful to some readers, her novel is also marred by significant flaws. Oddly, she only includes the term “Long COVID” once, in a sentence where Vita lists off other possible diagnoses including ME/CFS and fibromyalgia. Weinberg also doesn’t refer to the pandemic itself, or to characters masking. As a result, some readers are likely to misinterpret the novel’s context: many Goodreads reviewers have assumed that Vita’s exhaustion and descents into “The Pit” are symptoms of depression, rather than a physiological condition (albeit one that can affect mental health).
Even more disappointing is Vita’s sudden transformation after she meets her upstairs neighbors, a friendly older woman and her young male tenant. Where Vita could barely make her way up the stairs previously, she soon finds herself spending every afternoon in the company of her neighbors in their flat. While every case of Long COVID is different, I couldn’t help comparing Vita’s sudden ability to travel upstairs and spend hours socializing to my own struggles with those same tasks.
Fiction could serve as an invaluable tool for explaining the severity of Long COVID — and other chronic illnesses — to those who haven’t experienced them personally.
At the end of the novel, she leaves her apartment building and goes out for a walk. I took this personally, too: the ability to go out for a walk would infinitely improve my life, but as of now, it remains nothing more than a fantasy.
I don’t want to judge Weinberg’s work only on my own experiences, though it’s impossible for me not to read her novel through the prism of my own illness. She’s careful to note that Vita hasn’t fully recovered by the end of the novel, despite her sudden physical improvements. Even so, Vita’s story evokes common Western narratives of disability, which often treat disability as a source of inspiration. As Eli Clare writes in Brilliant Imperfection, “Overcoming bombards disabled people. It’s everywhere.” Even if a disabled person can’t be cured, they can ascend to a higher plane by “overcoming” their physical burdens.
Vita’s journey follows a similar trajectory in transforming chronic illness into a moral fable. Weinberg has said that she “made sure that Vita’s story, while trending towards self-discovery and release, is not too smooth and final.” But Vita’s “self-discovery and release” fuel a common fantasy in which illness liberates the sick person from their circumstances. By the end of the novel, in addition to feeling better physically, Vita has made new friends, broken up with her bad boyfriend, and come to terms with a childhood trauma. In many ways, her illness has made her a better and happier person. Few people living with Long COVID could say the same.
Another newly-published novel approaches the question of health and disability in a less straightforward way. In Small Rain, Garth Greenwell’s third novel, an unnamed poet finds himself in the emergency room in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, dealing with a sudden health crisis. Like Weinberg, Greenwell drew on his own experiences in writing this book. As he told The Bookseller, he “want[ed] to try to find a way in fiction to try and process that experience and to capture the minute-to-minute experience of being a patient.”
The resulting novel follows the poet’s drifting inner monologue as he spends day after day hospitalized, undergoing tests, taking medication, and waiting for a definitive diagnosis. Through a deliberately repetitive structure, Greenwell explores the feeling of having chronic illness: like so many other sick and disabled people, the poet-narrator fears for his health and is frustrated at his lack of control over his body and his circumstances. Nurses and doctors dictate his diet, keep him in bed, and strictly limit visits from his partner. Though the poet grudgingly accepts that these limitations are necessary, he is unnerved by not having agency. The doctors who visit his hospital room exacerbate the strangeness of his situation by treating him like an exciting, novel medical case, rather than as a suffering patient.
Slowly, as the days of his hospitalization pass, the poet begins to comprehend the severity of his condition, an arterial tear. Though his doctors could operate on the tear, they avoid doing so unless it is strictly necessary, leaving the poet to manage the condition with medication and follow-ups once he is discharged. “Well,” the poet tells his doctor, “that is just really unsatisfactory, I don’t like that at all.”
By this point in the novel, the poet realizes that there aren’t always satisfactory answers to questions of health, and that his relationship to his body will need to change. When he was first admitted, he insisted, “I’ve never had any problems … I realized that I had now said this several times, to several people, that I was repeating it like a defense or a justification.”
Anyone who has become disabled will recognize the feeling Greenwell expresses in these passages. When our reliance on our bodies is suddenly gone, the world is shockingly and permanently changed. And, like the narrator, we must accept new limitations over our body and our actions. Though most chronically ill people do not spend their lives trapped in a single room, whether at a hospital or at home, the claustrophobia of Greenwell’s novel captures the feeling of limitation that comes with chronic illness.
All the while, the COVID-19 pandemic is raging and climate change is wreaking havoc on the poet’s city and home. Though the specific health crisis he suffers is not COVID-related, the novel makes clear that precarity of his life is informed by these larger crises. In every case, avoiding a looming disaster will only lead to further damage as time passes.
When the poet leaves the hospital at the end of the novel, he is still weak, taking many medications, unsure of his future and the world’s. But Small Rain ends with community: his sister and his partner have come together to care for him. To me, this is a more hopeful and inspiring ending for a novel about disability than a protagonist walking alone.
Morgan Leigh Davies is a writer whose work has appeared in publications including Electric Lit, Bustle, the LARB, and more. She has Long COVID and other chronic illnesses and lives in Brooklyn with her cats.
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