Writing About Women In Sickness and In Health By Nora Gold
Writing About Women In Sickness and In Health
By Nora Gold
Since the publication on March 1st of my new book, In Sickness and In Health/Yom Kippur in a Gym (two novellas), many people have asked me why I chose to write one of the novellas about sickness. I point out to them that this novella is not only about sickness; it is also, as the title indicates, about health. In addition, it is about women’s strength, creativity, and resilience; the relationship between mind and body; the myth of normalcy; the experience of being different from those around you; the long-term effects of stigma; and the power of love.
Lily, the main character in In Sickness and In Health, suffers from a mysterious illness that no one can diagnose. It is something like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but different. Lily has seen seven specialists, none of whom understand what she has, yet all of them (except for the sole female doctor) treat her dismissively, don’t take her or her illness seriously, and imply that her symptoms are either psychosomatic or normal for a middle-aged woman. Sexism and ageism in the medical profession combine to work against Lily. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon experience for many women.
As a longstanding feminist interested in issues of women’s mental and physical health, and as someone who has done research in these areas, I think it is very important for women to write about the specific experiences and issues that affect us as women. And fiction, in my view, is a particularly potent medium for doing this. This is because fiction brings us into intimate contact with people with different lived experiences than our own, and this enables a different level of understanding about social problems than what can be learned from books that are exclusively analytical or informational. For this reason, I decided to write a work of fiction related to the issue of women’s health.
The topic of health and illness contains so many dimensions – physiological, psychological, social, political, emotional, and spiritual – that it is a real treasure trove for an author. It is also a topic highly relevant to many readers, not only because we live in a world still recovering from Covid, but because illness is one of the most universal human experiences, touching all of us either directly as patients or through someone we know and care about. And although sickness per se may be unpleasant or depressing, writing about it does not have to be. My novella, for instance, is full of humour. Lily’s favourite hobby is collecting exotic, surprising curses from multiple languages, and many of these are very funny. To offer just a few examples:
“Na mou klaseis ta’rxidia!” (Fart on my balls!) (Greek)
“Go ndéana an diabhal dréimire de cnámh do dhroma ag piocadh úll i ngairdín Ifrinn!” (May the devil make a ladder of your back bones while picking apples in the garden of hell!) (Gaelic)
“Jebiesz jeze!” (You fuck hedgehogs!) (Polish)
”Me cago en la leche!” (I shit in the milk!) (Spanish)
“Cao ni zu zong shi ba dai!” (Fuck the eighteen generations of your ancestors!) (Mandarin)
“Perhot’ podzalupnaya!” (Ass dandruff!) (Russian)
“May an long dai cham mui!” (You eat pubic hair with salt dip!) (Vietnamese)
The aspect of sickness that has always fascinated me the most is the effects on families of living with an ill or disabled family member, especially in terms of gender differences. When I was a social worker, I worked with families of children with developmental disabilities, and for my PhD I studied gender differences in families with a child with autism. I discovered in my research that the lives of these mothers and sisters were significantly more negatively affected by living with a child with autism than the fathers’ and brothers’. In addition, there were often great strains caused to the relationship between the parents and to their marriages.
What I chose to explore fictionally in In Sickness and In Health was the impact on one particular marriage of living with someone with a chronic illness. Marriages, like all relationships, are affected profoundly by the social context that surrounds them. In the case of Lily in In Sickness and In Health, her marriage is impacted by society’s skeptical, dismissive, even contemptuous, attitude toward her illness, as well as by the social stigma associated with the medical problems she faced as a child. A more supportive, inclusive environment – both medical and social – could have significantly alleviated some of the stresses on Lily’s marriage and her life as a whole.
I believe that encountering at close range another human being’s lived experience – for example through fiction – is crucial for educating ourselves and others and bringing about social change. So I hope that In Sickness and In Health will help open people’s eyes to the challenges faced by the many women living with chronic health conditions, as well as the need for change in the way these illnesses are related to both medically and in society at large.
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Dr. Nora Gold is the prize-winning author of five books and the founder and editor of the prestigious online literary journal Jewish Fiction which has readers in 140 countries. Gold was a tenured professor for ten years before leaving her academic position in order to write fiction fulltime. She subsequently spent six years as the Writer-in-Residence at the Centre for Women’s Studies at OISE/University of Toronto. Gold’s first book, Marrow and Other Stories, won a Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award and was praised by Alice Munro. Her novel Fields of Exile won the inaugural Canadian Jewish Literary Award for best novel and was acclaimed by Cynthia Ozick and Ruth Wisse. The Dead Man was honoured with a Canada Council for the Arts translation grant and published in Hebrew. 18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages, an anthology of translated works (October 2023), received glowing reviews from Publishers Weekly and Dara Horn. Her latest book, In Sickness and In Health/Yom Kippur in a Gym (two novellas), was published on March 1, 2024 and has already received international praise. noragold.com.
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This flip book is comprised of two novellas:
In Sickness and In Health – Lily had epilepsy as a child, so her most cherished goal has always been to be “normal”. By age 45 she has a “normal” life, including a family, friends, and an artistic career, and no one, not even her husband, knows the truth about her past. But now some cartoons she drew threaten to reveal her childhood secret and destroy her marriage and everything she has worked so hard for. A moving novella about shame, secrets, disabilities, and the limits and power of love.
Yom Kippur in a Gym – Five strangers at a Yom Kippur service in a gym are struggling with personal crises. Lucy can’t accept her husband’s Parkinson’s diagnosis. Ira, rejected by his lover, plans to commit suicide. Ezra is tormented by a mistake that ruined his career. Rachel worries about losing her job. Tom contemplates severing contact with his sisters. Then a medical emergency unexpectedly throws these five strangers together, and in one hour all their lives are changed in ways they would never have believed possible.
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Category: On Writing
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