Praise

“Instead of turning her pain into a performance, Wells made her illness into the basis for solidarity, finding in the histories of the mad and the ill material for her protest against the contemporary medical system... Charcot’s patients, Freud’s patients, Balanchine’s dancers, and herself all become examples of a type—women made to pose and perform their suffering for authorities who they hope will alleviate this pain, or elevate it.”
— The New Yorker

“Wells writes empathetically into the void.”
— The New Republic

“We perform for the camera, we perform for the doctor, we perform for the audience. Wells reveals the way that these different modes of bodily presence, though distinct, might also be intertwined.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books

 
 

“Gorgeously written and brilliantly argued, A Matter of Appearance uses chronic illness as a lever to investigate the life of a body. It’s complex, inconclusive, and incredibly clear-eyed. Moving fluidly between histories of psychoanalysis, desire, ambition, and pathology, Wells reminds us of the liminal state we all live in between sickness and health.”
— Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia and Summer of Hate

"A Matter of Appearance is what the genre of 'sick lit' is missing: Wells ties up the loose ends between the rich history of hysteria, consumption, and modern stories of autoimmunity, while resisting the maudlin. Absolutely dazzling."
— Lena Dunham, author of Not That Kind of Girl

“A Matter of Appearance brilliantly gives language to the body, and measures the distance between the kinds of narratives that tend to be projected onto women’s bodies and the stories these bodies are actually telling. Perceptive, fascinating, superb.”
— Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters

“Lyrical and enigmatic, ferocious and riveting, A Matter of Appearance is a primal scream, a memoir driven by the question of how to survive and make sense—not meaning—of a life of invisible physical suffering. Emily Wells is a brilliant and enthralling new voice.”
— Charmaine Craig, author of Miss Burma and My Nemesis

“Precise and unflinching, yet full of beauty, A Matter of Appearance draws impressive clarity from centuries of sources, which Wells deftly aligns to illuminate the conditions of living within the contradictions of womanhood and a human body."
— Kamala Puligandla, author of Zigzags

Press

Publisher’s description


A dazzling memoir of chronic illness that explores the fraught intersection between pain, language, and gender, a debut author.

Emily Wells, a former ballerina, spent her childhood dancing through intense, whole-body pain she assumed was normal for someone used to pushing her body to its limits. For years, no doctor could tell Wells what was wrong with her, or they told her it was “all in her head.” It was only in college that she learned the name for the illness she had been suffering from all her life: Behcet’s Disease, a rare congenital disorder causing blood vessel inflammation throughout the body, arthritis, and swelling of the brain.

In A Matter of Appearance, Wells, who now teaches writing at UC Irvine, traces her journey as she tries to understand and define this specific and personal pain, internally and externally. She draws on the critical works of Freud, Sontag, and others to explore the intersection between gender, pain, and language, tracing a line from the hysteria patients documented at the Salpêtrière Hospital in nineteenth-century Paris through to the contemporary New Age healers of Los Angeles, her stomping ground. At the crux of this is the dilemma of how to express in words an experience that is both private and public, subjective, and quantifiable.

A work of crystalline beauty and razorlike insight, A Matter of Appearance introduces a much needed millennial voice to the literature of illness.