What health memoirs reveal about the human condition

Writers are putting their vulnerabilities in print, and people are flocking to read about their recovery. Nick Duerden speaks with authors to understand this non-fiction boom

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The health memoir is, you might say, in tiptop condition. Robust, even. The section the genre occupies in bookshops – normally towards the back of the store, a safe distance from Jack Reacher and those Thursday Murder Club people – tends to enjoy consistent footfall, the carpet running threadbare as prospective readers loiter and mooch, browsing at length.

They are, invariably, spoilt for choice. Each month seems to offer ever more first-person accounts of living with cancer, or surviving cancer; those who have gone through a psychotic episode, or else have been diagnosed – or reliably misdiagnosed – with one of the many chronic conditions whose NHS pages offer such scant information. These are books that take confusion and distress as their starting points, but are filled with the indefatigable human spirit of survival. (Crucially, none possess the hectoring tone of its close cousin, the self-help tome.)

“Twenty years ago, memoir was an aristocratic vanity project,” says Holly Dawson, author of a health memoir of her own, All of Us Atoms, which is published this week, “but now it seems everyone is writing about their lives.”

If we read primarily in pursuit of escapism, we do so also to improve our understanding of life and its curveballs. “At some point,” Dawson says, “each of us will fall ill with something, or else someone close to us will.”

The genre is often notable for some particularly fine writing, as if the misery of illness has a direct impact on the quality of prose. Joan Didion may never have written a dull paragraph in her life, but her 2005 grief memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, revealed her at her most nakedly emotional. More recently, there was Simon Boas’