The Wellcome Book Prize Longlist, 2019

I’m delighted to once again be part of the Wellcome Book Prize shadow panel organised by Rebecca, alongside brilliant fellow bloggers Clare, Paul and Annabel. The prize highlights ‘the best new novels, memoirs and non-fiction that illuminate the breadth and depth of our relationship with health, medicine and illness’. The longlist was revealed yesterday, and it’s quite exciting! Here are my initial thoughts, organised by theme.

Masculinity and gender identity

I’ve had Thomas Page McBee’s memoir of his transition, Man Alive, on my TBR list for a while. I’m still most interested in the first book, but Amateur, which focuses on McBee training as a boxer, sounds like a fascinating glimpse into the experience of living as a trans man, something that is hugely neglected by the mainstream media, which tends to focus on trans women. I’ve become increasingly interested in what happens to ‘masculinity’ when it isn’t seen as solely a property of those born male – i.e. what it feels like to be a trans man, or a butch lesbian – and Amateur promises to explore this with style.

Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner is a biography of Sandra Pankhurst, a trans woman who runs a ‘trauma cleaning’ business, mopping up after sudden death, removing bodies that have lain alone and undiscovered for weeks, and dealing with living people who have taken to hoarding. As Krasnostein describes her, Sandra is ideally suited to this line of work, because she manages to provide ‘a bespoke blend of respect, warmth, humour and interest that establishes a basic human equity’, to all her clients, drawing from her own abusive past. I had mixed feelings about The Trauma Cleaner, which I reviewed here: the scenes of Sandra working with her cleaning clients are vivid and moving, but Krasnostein treads a little too carefully at times when dealing with Sandra’s past.

Finally, Matthew Sperling’s debut novel, Astroturf, promises to explore modern masculinity from the point of view of a man who starts taking steroids to bulk up his physique, and then starts a black-market business of his own. Promising to be ‘brilliantly funny’, I can’t say that this one especially appeals to me, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Memoirs of chronic illness

Jean Hannah Edelstein’s This Really Isn’t About You looks at how she deals with finding out that she’s inherited the gene for Lynch syndrome, which gives her a higher lifetime risk of certain types of cancer. This has been on my radar for a while, and I’m hoping it’ll be the book about finding your way in life that Meg Fee’s Places I Stopped on the Way Home wanted to be, with the added complication of Edelstein’s genetic inheritance. Very keen to read this one, and I’ve already requested it from my local library.

Arnold Thomas Manning’s memoir, Mind on Fire, deals with his experience of living with manic depression and delusions after experiencing his first episode in adolescence, following the death of his mother. I’m not sure I’ll get on with this one – I struggle with books about mental and physical illnesses where the person’s perception of reality is severely distorted – in other words, I’m happy to read about depression and anxiety but don’t really find it very interesting to read about dementia and schizophrenia. I’m not sure where Manning’s book will fall.

Everyone’s already heard of Tara Westover’s Educated, her account of growing up in a fundamentalist Mormon family in rural Idaho who didn’t send her to school, so she first set foot in a classroom when she was eighteen. While I liked Educated, finding it insightful, if uneven, I must admit I’m baffled as to what it’s doing on this longlist. I understand that Westover’s abusive father was probably mentally ill, but the memoir is primarily about Tara’s relationship with her family and how she copes in the outside world. Wellcome’s description, which focuses solely on the theme of education, isn’t illuminating either.

Proper medicine

Sandeep Jauhar’s Heart: A History is another of the titles on the longlist that really intrigues me. Jauhar, director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, has already written two medical memoirs about his own career, neither of which I’ve read, but both of which I want to read now I’ve heard about them! Heart takes a wider view, considering the history of research on the heart and Jauhar’s own family legacy of heart problems. This is one of those books that will definitely give me more flashbacks to GCSE Medicine Through Time.

Will Eaves’s Murmur sounds like important, but very grim reading: it deals with the legally enforced chemical castration of the homosexual mathematician Alan Turing, after he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1952. It promises to explore what ‘great bodily change… does to a person’s mind‘. I’m not sure I’ll be rushing out to pick this one up, though I’m pleased that Eaves has written it.

Finally, Thomas Abraham’s Polio: The Odyssey of Eradication sounds like it might have a lot in common with last year’s shortlistee, Meredith Wadman’s The Vaccine Race. Unlike Wadman, however, this book focuses on the campaign to wipe out a single disease: polio. While I enjoyed The Vaccine Race, and learnt a lot, I’m not sure I’m especially keen to tackle this one, especially as I imagine there will be crossover between the two.

Medical fictions

I adored Jessie Greengrass’s Sight, which I read when it was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018. One of my favourites on a very strong shortlist, Sight forms part of an emerging genre of autofiction, switching between the perspective of a woman pregnant with her second child to the subjects of her medical historical research in the Wellcome Library. Greengrass is especially good on pregnancy and motherhood; I don’t think I’ve ever read anything else as good on the subject.

I’ve been avoiding Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, despite the hype, because I intensely disliked Eileen. It sounds like a very different novel, however, focusing on a young woman’s year spent under the influence of a cocktail of drugs in New York at the turn of the millennium. I’m not sure what’s up with the ironic cover, which is pretty misleading and a big part of what’s been putting me off.

Akwaeke Emezi’s debut novel, Freshwater, deals with a young Igbo woman, Ada, who is ‘peopled with spirits’, and it’s narrated by the different selves within her. I’m torn about this one: I love the idea of the tension between Nigerian folklore and mental health diagnoses, but I think it’s very unlikely I’ll like something that sounds as surreal as this (and deals with mind-distorting mental illness; see above!) Apparently, this is also trendy autofiction. I’ll probably be reading it simply because it’s one of the two titles I can get at my local library, albeit in e-book form.

So there we go! I’m delighted by the freshness of the shortlist, but sad that there’s still no science fiction or speculative fiction on the list – James Smythe’s I Still Dream and Katie Williams’s Tell The Machine Goodnight were only two of the many novels that I thought could have been interesting contenders.

Have you read any of the books on the Wellcome longlist? Are there any worthy contenders that have been missed off?

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