Early this year I wrote about 11 books I was excited to read in 2024, but there were a few I either inadvertently left out or didn’t realize were on the horizon. I’m here to rectify that now.
Above are the covers of two books I’m VERY eager to read. Both deal with the subjects of chronic illness and disability (subjects I experience and think about a lot) in new and complex ways.
1. How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom,” Johanna Hedva (Sept. 3, 2024)
In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory”, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism―a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies―we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.
How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal―from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness―relying on and fueling ableism―to the detriment of us all.
With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.
2. “The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human,” Sophie Strand (March 4, 2025)
At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, through both profound fatigue with the medical industrial complex and a deeply entwined relationship with the natural world, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body. What if sickness is not a separation from the body? What if health is not quite so easy to see? What if physical pain leaves us no choice but to return to our bodies, the pinpricks and lightning of illness stitching us back into a physical presence our society has taught us to ignore?
In a work both expansively tender and shockingly frank, Sophie Strand offers readers a window onto her own winding journey through the maze of chronic illness—a web not unlike those created by the mycorrizhal fungi whose networks she begins to see as a metaphor for the profound connections between all species and the earth. Grounded deeply in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, each moment of this far-reaching narrative snakes its way through the multi-layered ecology of the land around us, from the stunningly powerful pollen of a phlox plant to the unexpected beauty and wisdom of the woodchuck.
The Body Is a Doorway dives into the murky waters of sickness and trauma, as well as the resonant challenges and joys of friendship, young adulthood, first love, and fertility. Throughout, in precise, sparkling language, it explores questions both personal and universal: Is there healing beyond the human? Beyond the hope for a cure or a happy ending? Is there something wilder and more symbiotic beyond narrow ideas of well-being?
And some others I inadvertently left out in January:
1. “From Elder to Ancestor: Nature Kinship for All Seasons of Life,” S. Kelley Harrell (out now): “This book explains how, through personal introspection and engagement with the living world around us, we can cultivate our unique way to elder well.”
2. “You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music,” Glenn McDonald (out now): “Spotify's former data guru charts how music's digital revolution affects fans and musicians.”
3. “The Time of My Life: Dirty Dancing,” Andrea Warner (out now): “An engaging exploration into the enduring popularity of Dirty Dancing and its lasting themes of feminism, activism, and reproductive rights.”
4. “Karaoke Queen,” Dominic Lim (Sept. 17, 2024): “A man hopes his drag queen alter ego will help save a karaoke bar and give him a second chance at love in this joyfully queer rom-com.”
5. “Much Ado About Keanu: A Critical Reeves Theory,” Sezin Koehler (March 11, 2025): “Much Ado About Keanu provides the deep dive into his art, identity, and ethnicity that this oft-misunderstood cultural icon deserves.”