The importance of writing illness, more sensual, more obscene

My reflections on my chat with Polly Atkin, and how illness informs form.

Last week I spoke to author and poet, Polly Atkin about her award-winning memoir, Some of Us Just Fall and I was struck by how her life influences the form of her writing, in her case, her experience of living with two chronic health conditions (Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a form of hypermobility, and hemochromatosis, an inherited condition where iron builds up in the body).

Her memoir begins with a kind of mission statement:

‘How do you tell a story to someone else when you can’t understand it yourself as something with a beginning, a middle and an end, but only as an assembly of interwoven episodes? Of fracture after fracture.’