PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)The kind of language used to describe and diagnose illness is very important, and Hattrick’s book might be seen as a kind of virtuosic riff on the ideas Susan Sontag expressed in (1978). Like Sontag, Hattrick accepts the inevitability of metaphoric thinking; but they also set out to resist the dominant metaphors used by medical professionals ... Hattrick’s book is full of other women sufferers with too much flair for metaphor – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alice James, Virginia Woolf, all of whose attempts to describe illness are at odds with the public and often patriarchal language of medical science ... Through these historical figures, Hattrick’s book glimpses other possibilities, a more utopian \'kingdom of the ill\' with a \'shared hysterical language.\'
