TALK: Writing Yourself Well with Caroline Crampton

Writing Yourself Well with Caroline Crampton 
At 7pm-8pm on Thursday 19th June
In person tickets from £18. View online [Zoom] tickets £10. Click here to purchase.


Writing about illness is an entire genre unto itself — memoirs of extraordinary pain and survival against the odds are regulars on bookshop shelves and bestseller lists alike. But what is it actually like to write about your illnesses, and how can it impact how you feel?  

In order to write her book A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria, writer and podcaster Caroline Crampton spent five years immersed in stories about illness from writers like Philip Larkin, Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Austen and many others. Over time, this intimacy with all of the different ways to be unwell actually began to have a positive effect on Caroline’s own hypochondria and her relationship with her health.  

By sharing these literary stories from the past and recounting the techniques involved in crafting her own story, Caroline’s talk discusses how the ways we read – and write – about our illnesses can impact the way we experience them. 

Caroline Crampton is a writer and podcaster whose work aims to bring people closer to material they may never have considered approachable before. As she says, ‘I like to combine autobiography, deep research, careful structure and considered prose to produce work that will, I hope, inform as much as it entertains or delights’. 
 
Caroline’s first book, The Way to the Sea: The Forgotten Histories of the Thames Estuary (2019) combines the unusual personal story of her parents’ emigration to Britain on a small boat with travelogue, history, literary criticism and a portrait of an unusual landscape.

Her next book, A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria (2024), is a chronological narrative of health anxiety spanning from the very earliest humans to today. Critics hailed it as a ‘landmark’ book for its examination of what this universal doubt and fear can tell us about life and medicine in every age, as well as relating Caroline’s own experiences as a teenage cancer survivor who perpetually fears she will be sick again.  
 
Alongside her book projects, Caroline produces a fortnightly podcast, Shedunnit (BBC Sounds); each episode looks at an aspect of golden age detective fiction, covering everything from Agatha Christie’s skill at archaeology to the influence of science on whodunnits.


Photograph by Jamie Drew.

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