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Sarah Manguso
Jenny Blair
Writers & Readers
FEVER : Sarah Manguso & Jenny Blair
7PM Reception; 7:45PM Readings; Discussion to follow
$5/Free for Real Art Ways Members
FEVER features two writers who approach the very human side of illness and medicine.
Sarah Manguso (whose memoir The Two Kinds of Decay was just published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux) was faced at twenty-one with a disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything. She recounts her nine-year struggle with collapsed veins, addiction and depression, and perhaps the unkindest cut of all for a writer—the trite metaphors that accompany prolonged illness. Ultimately, though, hers is not so much a chronicle of triumph or tragedy as it is simply a story about learning to pay attention. And in so doing, she manages with tremendous grace and self-awareness to train our eyes anew on the very notion of illness and survival. You can read excerpts of her work by clicking here.
Jenny Blair is a writer and physician in Chicago, Illinois. She earned her B.S. in geology at Yale University and her M.D. at the Yale School of Medicine, and completed her residency in emergency medicine at the University of Chicago in 2007. From 2002–2007 she wrote “First Opinion,” a column in the Hartford Courant describing her experiences in medicine. It twice won National Headliner Awards for Special Column on One Subject; other winners included Fareed Zakaria (2003) and Anna Quindlen (2006). In addition, she contributed essays and illustrated features to Yale Medicine Magazine, and published book reviews and research papers in the medical literature, while in medical training. She has been recognized as an outstanding teacher by her medical students and honored for her humanism as a physician by her colleagues. You can read from a selection of her essays, here.