The Body’s Betrayals 

Sally Crossley 

Meghan O’Rourke, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, Random House, 2022. 336 pp. $28. Hardcover. 

Suleika Jaouad, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, Random House, 2021. 368 pp. $28. Hardcover. 

Frank Bruni, The Beauty of Dusk: on Vision Lost and Found, Simon and Schuster, 2022. 320 pp. $28. Hardcover.  

Sarah Ruhl, Smile: A Memoir, Marysue Rucci Books/Scribner, 2022. 247 pp., $17 (Trade Paperback). 

In the beginning of her book Illness as Metaphor (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1978) Susan Sontag writes,  

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 the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of the other place.  

Because everyone will be afflicted at some point in their lives, Sontag argues, it’s essential for society (which, she pointedly notes, includes both doctors and writers) to adopt a “truthful way of regarding illness . . . one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.” She is referring to the way that, for centuries, society saw illness as either a punishment or a moral failing, putting the patient at fault. AIDS is the most recent epidemic in common memory (before COVID) where victims were seen to have brought the illness on themselves; this is what prompted Sontag to write, years later, a book concerned with that disease, AIDS and its Metaphors. In addition, Sontag criticizes doctors who refused to share a poor prognosis with patients, faulting them for their dishonesty. 

Being “truthful” about illness, though, is a delicate business. How much truth do patients really want, especially when the prognosis is poor? Even when at a safe remove, many healthy people avoid discussing illness, as if the patient’s bad luck will somehow rub off. People want a measure of hope, even if it’s not grounded in reality. Despite what she says in Illness as Metaphor, Sontag, when she was dying of cancer, made it clear to her son, David Rieff, that she did not want to know if she was dying, did not want to know when the end was coming (“Why I Had to Lie to My Dying Mother,” The Guardian, May 18, 2008).