A Body Made of Glass oscillates between lengthy paragraphs of scholarship and periods of self-scrutiny, including therapy ... Following her thought process is sort of a magical, trippy experience, with a whiff of Alice in Wonderland nibbling the magic mushroom.
A Body Made of Glass is a product of impressively thorough research, but it is sometimes circuitous and digressive to the point of frenzy. It blends memoir and literary criticism with micro-histories of subjects of varying relevance ... Still, A Body Made of Glass is full of fascinating forays. If it is hard to read for its claims or conclusions, it can still be read for its many sobering observations about sickness.
Blending memoir and cultural history, it is lucid, broad in scope, full of nuanced reflection ... Crampton’s research is underscored by her compassion for hypochondriacs... and a bleak humour at the daft situations in which they find themselves ... Threaded through this comprehensive historical account are Crampton’s own experiences of health-related trauma, and it’s in these moments that the writing moves from scholarly to elegantly poetic.
Fascinating and intelligent... suffused with the intensity of feeling that hypochondria ignites ... Crampton rejects the convention that illness narratives should end with either tragedy or cure ... Avoiding the trap of false reassurance, however appealing for those experiencing hypochondria, she sets an example.
Since her cancer treatment, Crampton has found herself irretrievably fragile, or irretrievably aware of her fragility: tantamount to the same thing, she points out ... There should be no surprise that a world with "insert helpline number here" is also a world where we make doctors out of search engines; where we pay for Zeebo-brand "honest placebo pills" because it still feels healthy to be taking something, even if that something is nothing.
Though the book is marketed as a hybrid memoir and Crampton’s story serves as an anchor, her experiences make up a fairly small proportion of A Body Made of Glass. The book ranges comprehensively not only through the history of hypochondria, but also through hypochondria’s appearances in books and culture.
Riveting, genre-bending ... "Hypochondria only has questions," Crampton writes, "never answers," and her narrative follows suit, delivering few concrete takeaways. Still, it’s a stimulating and rigorous take on a slippery subject.
