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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
Original language
English

A HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS

Anna DeForest

A young woman puts on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. So begins this powerful debut, which follows our unnamed narrator through cadaver dissection, surgical rotation, difficult births, sudden deaths, and a budding relationship with a seminarian.

In the troubled world of the hospital, where the language of blood tests and organ systems so often hides the heart of the matter, she works her way from one bed to another, from a man dying of substance use and tuberculosis, to a child in pain crisis, to a young woman, fading from confusion to aphasia to death. The long hours and heartrending work begin to blur the lines between her new life as a physician and the lifelong traumas she has fled.

In brilliant, wry, and biting prose, A History of Present Illness is a boldly honest meditation on the body, the hope of healing in the face of total loss, and what it means to be alive.

Anna DeForest is a neurologist and palliative care physician in New York City. Her writing has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Paris Review. This is her first novel.
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Published 2022-08-01 by Little, Brown (US)

Comments

"[The] writing is dreamlike and fragmentary, a sequence of vivid scenes that the reader must piece together, like a puzzle, to understand who exactly is telling us this story. The answer, tucked in the book's last pages, is a revelation." Read more...

"The early aspects of medical training really are an indoctrination. You're not just learning science. You're learning a different way of being a person. The way that you're learning is in this system that is phenomenal, necessary and good, which, at the same time, is a really toxic environment. Anyone who's been in a hospital can tell you it's not the best place in the world when it comes to being treated like a human being." Read more...

"Brutal and brave, DeForest's novel is one of the best in the ‘making of a doctor' genre. And its plucky protagonist, casualty and hero, roars a universal truth, ‘We all hurt.'” (starred review)

“A History of Present Illness is a singular read, full of beauty and wit and monstrous truth. It took me down dark corridors of loss and out into the too bright sunshine again. I've never read anything like it. Wholly original and shockingly brilliant.” ?Jenny Offill, author of Weather "This book destroyed my heart, and then restored it. The raw eloquence of the language, the wisdom spiked with gallows humor, the young woman who transcends an early life of damage—the tension and triumph come from how easily the narrator's life could have gone the other way. She wonders: 'To get over what you've come from but to stay who you are. What would that even look like?' It looks like this novel, and it is beautiful." ?Amy Hempel, author of The Collected Stories "Nowhere else have I ever encountered such brutal wisdom—about life, about the body, about our shared circumstance as the future dead—delivered with such grace, such largeness of heart. Anna DeForest's fearless, unsparing debut is a life raft thrown out for all of us to cling to." ?Garielle Lutz, author of The Complete Gary Lutz