Touch Me, I’m Sick: A Memoir in Essays

Educator Feldman debuts with a vulnerable and ambitious essay collection about illness. The book opens with a short prelude juxtaposing two trauma responses to sexual assault—Ida Bauer (better known as “Dora” in Freud’s famous case study of female hysteria) was stricken by temporary muteness, the author by a violent eczema flare-up—laying the groundwork to explore intimate links between chronic illness, trauma, hysteria, and sex. From there, Feldman examines society’s tendency to deem certain bodies as “unworthy of desire” and “pathologize” sex that fails to adhere to narrow standards, how illness produces isolation and how unexpected interventions like “sickness selfies”—selfies of ill people, “taken in beds and bathtubs, in hospitals or treatment centers”—combat it by constructing “a community of care” between the ill person and the healthy, and the ways those in queer and straight relationships harm and heal one another. Raw depictions of the author’s own encounters with illness—including their struggles with fibromyalgia, and caring for their ALS-stricken father—are interwoven with an impressive array of critical theory and cultural criticism, making for a wide-ranging look at the often-binary ways society views bodies and how communities can foster new forms of healing. The result is eye-opening. (Sept.)