November Narrative Medicine Rounds

“Hypochondria and History: Searching for Story,” a talk by novelist Deborah Levy

For our November Narrative Medicine Rounds, we welcome Deborah Levy, the acclaimed author of six novels including Swimming Home and Hot Milk, both nominated for the Booker Prize, and most recently The Man Who Saw Everything, to be published in the USA in October 2019. Levy will be speaking about “Hypochondria and History: Searching for Story.”

About her novel Hot Milk, Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad And Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present, said: “A hot Attic sun glares down on Levy’s novel, imbuing her mere mortals with a mythic dimension and exposing the monsters within. Maternal hysteria here is more toxic to a daughter who struggles to leave home and become woman than the floating jellyfish that choke the sea. Only Elena Ferrante writes of the seepages of illness and woman’s identity in the family with equal insight. As gripping as it is unputdownable, Hot Milk is a novel by a writer at the peak of her talents.”

Levy’s two works of memoir, Things I Don’t Want to Know and The Cost of Living, have been widely translated across the world. Levy has written for The Royal Shakespeare Company; her dramatizations of two of Freud’s case studies, Dora and The Wolfman, were broadcast by the BBC. Levy was a 2018-19 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Paris, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. These events are free and open to the public.

PLEASE NOTE: November Narrative Medicine Rounds will take place in the Alumni Auditorium, instead of the Faculty Club.