PRAISE FOR A HISTORY OF PRESENT ILLNESS
“Raw and eloquent language in taut narrative fragments gives this debut novel of a young doctor’s first year in a city hospital an exceptional power. No stranger to trauma in her own earlier life, the new doctor finds herself carried along by her natural empathy, profound questions, and deeply decent soul. Quotable and memorable, this novel is a series of emotionally charged encounters informed by a physician’s desire to bring compassionate attention to those who need it most.”
—THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS
“A History of Present Illness offers us the perspective of a doctor who feels everything. The writing is dreamlike and fragmentary, a sequence of vivid scenes that the reader must piece together, like a puzzle, to understand who exactly is telling us this story. The answer, tucked in the book’s last pages, is a revelation.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES
“A History of Present Illness is a singular read, full of beauty and wit and monstrous truth. It took me down dark corridors of loss and out into the too bright sunshine again. I’ve never read anything like it. Wholly original and shockingly brilliant.”
— JENNY OFFILL, author of Weather
“Nowhere else have I ever encountered such brutal wisdom—about life, about the body, about our shared circumstance as the future dead—delivered with such grace, such largeness of heart. Anna DeForest's fearless, unsparing debut is a life raft thrown out for all of us to cling to.”
— GARIELLE LUTZ, author of The Complete Gary Lutz
“Anna DeForest stares death in the eye, understands it fully, and writes it down simply. Like all mortals, I’ve acutely needed this book all my life. At last it’s here.”
— SARAH MANGUSO, author of Very Cold People
“This book destroyed my heart, and then restored it. The raw eloquence of the language, the wisdom spiked with gallows humor, the young doctor who transcends an early life of damage—the tension and triumph come from how easily the narrator’s life could have gone the other way. They wonder: ‘To get over what you've come from but to stay who you are. What would that even look like?’ It looks like this novel, and it is beautiful.”
— AMY HEMPEL, author of The Collected Stories