The Consolations of the Illness Memoir
Sick (2018), and Anne Boyer’s The Undying (2019), for a few examples, all play with form and question the utility of a linear story with a definite conclusion. This makes Tessa Miller’s new book, , a bit of a throwback. A memoir of being diagnosed and living with Crohn’s disease, Miller’s book offers a didactic narrative, in Hawkins’s taxonomy, or a questing one, in Frank’s. Hers is one of triumph, if not restitution. Tessa Miller really wants to help. A tightly-wound achiever, “I’d planned for everything,” she writes in the book’s early pages . “I signed up for ev...