Memoirs of illness are tricky. The raw material is often compelling: dramatic symptoms, embarrassing public moments, and unavoidable relationship pressures. The challenge is to share that raw material in a new way. Not every memoir needs to turn on the conceit that illness is an obstacle that must be overcome.

Full disclosure: I have multiple sclerosis. I approached Caro Llewellyn’s memoir Diving into Glass with excitement and a healthy dose of cynicism. Excitement, because reading about the symptoms and experiences of another person with MS is fascinating. There is a potential common bond when someone I have never met describes the exact feeling I have been trying to communicate to my neurologist. Those of us who are ill need a common language. I also approached the book with a certain cynicism. I am not just looking for stories, I seek prose or insight to illuminate my condition.

Richard Cohen, the American journalist who has lived with MS for three decades, calls those of us who are chronically ill ‘citizens of sickness’. I’ve read many memoirs about illness. There are sub-genres to explore – not just misery-lit and sick-lit, but memoirs of alcoholism and addiction, of recovery from trauma, of grief, of living with mental illness, and, finally, of terminal illness. As a citizen of sickness, I read such memoirs because I want to find someone who has had an experience or a symptom like mine.

1

In my mind he is always half the age
I am now as he stands on a green shelf
of Razorback mountain. I will wait
for him forever in the backseat of a car,
my chin numbing on the window ledge
as I study his black hair shuffling
the void between earth and dark sky.
My eyes walk him back from the edge.
What does he know of life which as yet
is still a question. His wife at home
breastfeeding and reading industrial
relations texts as we hunt for geodes
along the river – chalcedony, bloodstone,
sardonyx – I’ve found, he says, a place to die.

2

Night crawlers writhe violently in a tin.
He washes his hands in dirt and tries
to pull one from the tangle. Hold it still,
he tells me. His hands are shaking.
I squint as he spears a worm with a hook
and slides it up to the line. My eyes open
as he threads another. He drops my line
in the waterhole and ties a blue tarpaulin
to a tree. You’ll never be a full citizen
of this family, she said before we left. I reel
in a catfish. He pins it with a knee and rips
the hook from its mouth. Half of me
disappears and the other half falls to a hard
foundation I wasn’t sure he was holding.

3

The scream of a wet diamond blade
bisecting stone cannot hope to drown
the ancient rhythms and repetitions
of the marital argument I have learned
by heart. I drive the rock into the blade.
My wrists are splattered with slurry.
It greys my hair and coats my tongue.
The language I inherited is not yet
large enough for the work I have to do.
Our last night in Lost World I heard
him sobbing by the fire and years later
I am abducted by a poem as if carried
off by a hawk. When the rock cracks
open there is nothing inside but rock.

According to most accounts, the history of computing is a triumph of enterprise. This story starts in the 1950s and 1960s with commercial mainframe computers that, one stack of punch-cards at a time, assumed business tasks ranging from managing airline reservations to calculating betting odds. But the public’s day-to-day life looked much the same. Then, in the mid-1970s, geniuses like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates pioneered home computing. Personal computers, and later smartphones and the internet, became the defining technologies of our age. Nerdy men, often in their garages, had remade the world.

An appealing story, but it leaves out a lot. In fact, it might leave out the key parts. People were sending electronic messages all over New England in 1968. Around that time, professors and students at Dartmouth College pioneered the BASIC programming language, innovative for prioritising clarity over efficiency. Soon it was the lingua franca of hobbyists and students worldwide. In the early 1970s, the People’s Computing Company organised low-cost classes, school visits, and circulated publications that featured computer programs readers could copy, modify, and redistribute. This social world was the fertile soil from which personal computing grew.

My favourite image from Stanley Corngold’s Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, humanist, heretic is set in Berlin as World War II concludes. Young Walter Kaufmann, a German Jew forced to flee the National Socialist regime to the United States, has returned to his native land as part of the occupying forces. Kaufmann is steeped in a German intellectual tradition of Bildung, meaning education or culture. This humanist tradition sees philosophy and literature as serving to liberate, challenge, and cultivate the self.

In occupied Germany, Kaufmann sees the tradition of Bildung humiliated and degraded by the inhumanity of Nazism. Some of the canonical texts are accused of harbouring proto-Nazi ideas. Others have been claimed by Nazi ideologues seeking to fashion an intellectual foundation for the fascist regime. In a bookstore, Kaufmann discovers an edition of the works of a writer tarred more heavily with the Nazi brush than most – Friedrich Nietzsche – and is absorbed. On his return to the United States, Kaufmann commences an immensely productive career as a philosopher, translator, poet, and photographer, drawing upon and indefatigably defending this German tradition.