A Matter of Appearance: A Memoir

by Emily Wells

Overview

A dazzling memoir of chronic illness that explores the fraught intersection between pain, language, and gender, by a debut author.

Emily Wells spent her childhood dancing through intense pain she assumed was normal for a ballerina pushing her body to its limits. For years, no doctor could tell Wells what was wrong with her, or they told her it was all in her head.

In A Matter of Appearance, Wells traces her journey as she tries to understand and define the chronic pain she has lived with all her life. She draws on the critical works of Freud, Sontag, and others to explore the intersection between gender, pain, and language, and she traces a direct line from the “hysteria patients” at the Salpêtrière Hospital in nineteenth-century Paris to the contemporary New Age healers in Los Angeles, her stomping ground. At the crux of Wells’ literary project is the dilemma of how to diagnose an experience that is both private and public, subjective and quantifiable, and how to express all this in words.

“Gorgeously written and brilliantly argued, A Matter of Appearance uses chronic illness as a lever to investigate the life of a body. It’s complex, inconclusive, and incredibly clear-eyed. Moving fluidly between histories of psychoanalysis, desire, ambition, pathology, Wells reminds us of the liminal state we all live in between sickness and health.”
—Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia and Summer of Hate

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644212769
Publisher:	Seven Stories Press
Publication date:	05/16/2023
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	702,543
Product dimensions:	5.67(w) x 8.51(h) x 0.66(d)

About the Author

EMILY WELLS is a writer based in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside and teaches writing at UC Irvine. She writes for publications including Bookforum, Vogue, Interview Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The White Review, Flash Art, and Purple Fashion Magazine. She has been a magazine editor, fashion model, crime reporter, and classically trained ballet dancer.

Editorial Reviews

Drawing on the archives of sickness and her own experience as a patient, [Wells] demands a more nuanced understanding of the diagnostic categories of mental illness and biological illness”—The New Yorker

“Wells’s rare autoimmune disease is only diagnosed when she becomes an adult, having suffered since childhood from symptoms that were chalked up to her emotions. Yet she quickly begins to understand that ‘just because something has a name doesn’t mean people believe it is real.’ This follows in medical scenarios: being asked to quantify pain on a scale of 1 to 10 is a struggle, ‘unsure of how to turn a sensation into a number.’ … Writing through and of pain will inevitably include these complications of expression, and A Matter of Appearance serves a reminder that it is still worth trying to translate a perpetual scream.”– Art Review

"Emily Wells in her new memoir A Matter of Appearance...manages to shift the issue of pain into the public sphere without pretending that it is easily legible."—Emma Cohen, LARB

“Gorgeously written and brilliantly argued, A Matter of Appearance uses chronic illness as a lever to investigate the life of a body. It’s complex, inconclusive, and incredibly clear-eyed. Moving fluidly between histories of psychoanalysis, desire, ambition, pathology, Wells reminds us of the liminal state we all live in between sickness and health.” —Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia and Summer of Hate

"A Matter of Appearance brilliantly gives language to the body, and measures the distance between the kinds of narratives that tend to be projected onto women’s bodies and the stories these bodies are actually telling. Perceptive, fascinating, superb."—Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters

“Lyrical and enigmatic, ferocious and riveting, A Matter of Appearance is a primal scream, a memoir driven by the question of how to survive and make sense—not meaning—of a life of invisible physical suffering.  Emily Wells is a brilliant and enthralling new voice.” —Charmaine Craig, author of Miss Burma and My Nemesis

"A Matter of Appearance is what the genre of 'sick lit' is missing: Wells ties up the loose ends between the rich history of hysteria, consumption, and modern stories of autoimmunity, while resisting the maudlin. Absolutely dazzling." —Lena Dunham

"Precise and unflinching, yet full of beauty, A Matter of Appearance draws impressive clarity from centuries of sources, which Wells deftly aligns to illuminate the conditions of living within the contradictions of womanhood and a human body." — Kamala Puligandla, author of Zigzags

From the Publisher