SIGNS OF LIFE

A collection of stories and essays about illness and caregiving.

As someone who’s studied both medical science and literature, editor Sasson had an interest in how people cope both with their own health issues and with treating or caring for others, and she put out a call for stories on those themes. After receiving a flood of submissions—both factual and fictional, from around the world—she realized that “these were vital stories that demanded to be told.” In these works, more than 20 writers tell stories from the points of view of family members, health care professionals, or patients. Some relate the smallest of victories during years of treatments, while others focus on rare and harrowing medical interventions, such as Ann Calandro’s terrifying description of doctors drilling into a skull in “The Halo.” There’s also the slow, painful realization of how a diagnosis can upend one’s life, as in Peter Mitchell’s haunting story of HIV, “Call of the Crow.” The grueling duties of doctors and nurses are represented in stories such as Rukayatu Ibrahim’s “We Do What We Can,” set at a hospital in Ghana, and Steve Cushman’s “Fracture City,” depicting a fleeting moment of reprieve from an emergency room. The tone varies greatly from writer to writer—D.E.L.’s “Win a Date With John Mayer!” for example, manages to offer welcome black humor in a story of a psychotic break at Starbucks—and Sasson presents stories about a wide, inclusive range of mental and physical ailments along with a helpful index that sorts the works based on diagnoses. A common element of all the works is how they highlight the difficulty of going about one’s everyday life, despite trauma. “You go home. You take the drug. When you wake up, you feel all smeared inside,” Vanessa McClelland writes in the standout story “Fuddle,” which deftly encapsulates the frustration, exhaustion, and perseverance that runs through the whole collection.

A rich and varied set of ailment-related works.