Seven books that vividly capture hospitalization

Anna DeForest is an author and physician whose work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Paris Review. DeForest has an MFA from Brooklyn College and an MD from Columbia University, and currently works in palliative care at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

A History of Present Illness is her first novel.

At Electric Lit DeForest tagged seven books that "stretch across genres to capture the confusion and powerlessness of being subject to a body, subject to a hospital, subject to life and death." One title on the list:

My Happy Life by Lydia Millet

A place like a hospital provides a frame for the recollections of a vagrant woman, unwanted since birth, found abandoned as an infant in a shoebox. The woman recounts with a tone like wonder her bare life of trauma and isolation. When finally she is locked away and forgotten, left to eat toothpaste and plaster dust until the world dissolves around her, she leaves us at least half-enlightened (and fully grateful for life) on the right side of the walls. Grim and surreal, this singular novel is a haunting meditation on optimism in a violent and senseless world.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 99 Test: My Happy Life.

--Marshal Zeringue