Susanna Clarke: ‘I had been ill for 11 years. I felt like I was about to fall off the world’

One hundred years after Virginia Woolf explored the limitations of language in On Being Ill, the Piranesi author reflects on the power of storytelling to shape our experience of sickness

In October 2016 I was in hospital. I had been ill for 11 years with something I called chronic fatigue syndrome, but in the previous six weeks I had been overtaken by a strange, sudden crisis. I was unable to eat – a day when I managed a couple of biscuits was a good day; at times I trembled so violently that my voice shook; at night I was overwhelmed by dread.

In the hospital ward a consultant gastroenterologist appeared.
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