View the archive of my two-hour class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about what it means to write our stories of illness, injury, and recovery

I’m Sarah Fay, and I hope you’ll join me for my live, two-hour class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing Illness.

Our stories of illness need to be told. Each of us brings a different perspective, and it’s only by having varied voices speak about the experience of having cancer, or AIDS, or mental illness that we can try to understand it and feel less alone.

Writing illness is something I think a lot about. As an author at HarperCollins, I’ve written two illness memoirs and am currently writing my third.

My first book, Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses, is about the twenty-five years I spent in the mental health system, where I received six different diagnoses. That book has changed a lot of people’s lives and certainly changed mine. It allowed me to think of illness—particularly my illness—differently. 

Then I wrote the sequel Cured, which is about my recovery from serious mental illness (which we’re told isn’t possible but is). 

Now I’m working on an illness memoir about my mother’s precipitous fall into dementia.

Like so many, illness fascinates and terrifies me. I can only get a handle on it when I sit down and write. Whether you’re writing an illness memoir or just have a story you want to process and tell, this class will be an interactive experience with us exploring the five questions I’ve asked and continue to ask myself as I do so: 

  • How do we describe the indescribable—the physical, the emotional, the mental pain that we go through? How do we even get that down on paper and put it in words? 
  • How do we say something new? Only the rarest diagnoses haven’t been written about. Illness memoirs are everywhere, right? Sick lit, pain procedurals, literature of suffering, etc.
  • How do we evoke emotion in the reader, so our story of illness doesn’t sound like one big long pity party for ourselves? 
  • How do we make our story about something bigger than ourselves? How do we think about it in terms of the human experience so readers can come to it, too, even if they’ve never had Parkinson’s or dementia or whatever it might be?
  • Finally, there’s the most difficult question of all: Does healing really occur in the act of writing? When I was on tour for Pathological I was asked over and over and over again: Did writing the book heal you? 

I’ll reveal my answer to that question in class. 

See you there!

All my best, 

Sarah