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Susan Sontag has said, “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Author Lina Meruane challenges the idea that people with illnesses are necessarily separated into a different kingdom than those who are not sick, asserting instead that illness can be part of anyone’s normality. She makes this case through her novel, Nervous System. The novel tells the stories of four family members and a boyfriend who, at one time or another, develop a serious illness or help take care of one of the others with a serious illness: it’s all illness, it’s all the time, it’s normal. We talk with Dr. Meruane about her idea of illness as normality as she presented it in the novel, and about how its atypical structure and its evocative and memorable prose contribute to the stories told and the ideas offered.

Source

Nervous System by Lina Meruane, translated by Meghan McDowell, Graywolf Press, 2021.

Links

• Lina Meruane’s bio
• Russell Teagarden’s blog piece about the novel, Nervous System, and his blog piece about the MRI scene in the novel.
• Russell Teagarden’s blog piece about Lina Meruane’s novel, Seeing Red.
• Video conversation between Lina Meruane and Meghan McDowell about Nervous System.
• Interview with Lina Meruane in LALT magazine about Nervous System.

A big thanks to Lina Meruane for sharing her thoughts on illness as normality and her writing processes.

Our next episode will draw from the journalist Michael Pollan’s books investigating the prospects for psychedelics in the management of various mental health problems, or even to make individuals and societies better than well.

Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to this text link, or email to: russell.teagarden@theclinicandtheperson.com.

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