All Books

A personal and literary examination of hypochondria.

A free-wheeling philosophical essay, Hypochondria combines cultural critique, literary history, and Rees’s own experience of health anxiety to ask what we might learn from the hypochondriac’s discomforting experience of their body.

Hypochondria is unashamedly capacious in its range of references, from the writings of Robert Burton, Franz Kafka and Charlotte Brontë to original yet accessible readings of theorists like Lauren Berlant and Maurice Blanchot. Whether he is discussing Seinfeld, John Donne or his own hypochondriac past, Rees reveals himself to be a wry and perceptive critic, exploring the causes – and the costs – of our desire for certainty.

An exercise in what Freud calls “evenly suspended attention,” Hypochondria demonstrates the rewards and the perils of reading (too) closely the common but typically overlooked aspects of our everyday lives.

“In Hypochondria, Will Rees pulls off an almost impossible balancing act. He recalls his personal history with great clarity and vulnerability, and he assembles a dazzling archive of his fellow writers and hypochondriacs: Melville, Kafka, Freud, Sartre, Didion. Hypochondria, Rees shows us, is a specific case of fantasizing about what we cannot know – we are all, in our own ways, hypochondriacs.” – Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers

“Hypochondria is a beautifully written, exacting, exquisite piece of literature and an urgent intervention into a deeply necessary conversation that has languished in the shadows for far too long. This book is as clever as it is brave, and it will change and move everyone who reads it. To capture the intricacies of our relationship with illness, both individually and in our collective consciousness, is one of the most difficult things a writer can do – Will has done it perfectly. Everyone must read this book.” – Lucia Osborne-Crowley, author of The Lasting Harm

“I marvelled at this elegant and intellectually capacious book. Unmoored by its elusive subject, Rees innovates an utterly engrossing mode of inquiry that seems forged from the very material of hypochondria itself — radical doubt. And, like all good hypochondriacs, this book is many things at once: a philosophical intrigue, a meticulous catalogue of symptoms, a literature of writerly ailments, and a gripping tale of desire’s shadow. Here are hypochondria’s many indignities, but also its raptures and romance. What emerges from Rees’s ability to dwell in uncertainty is proof of doubt’s generative potential; its questions are insistent and hard-won vital signs. What if we are what we read? What if health is little more than blissful ignorance? What if we can never be sure of just how sick we really are?” – Daisy Lafarge, author of Paul

“This elegant and finely crafted essay will be enlightening not only for those who suffer from health anxieties but, more generally, for anyone confronting the problem of inhabiting the human body. Blending autobiography, history, and theory, it raises crucial questions about our embodied existence in an engaging and accessible way.” – Darian Leader, author of The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression

“‘The position of hypochondria has never been less certain,’ Will Rees writes in this extraordinary and utterly compelling new book. Part personal memoir, and part riveting history of the fateful and absorbing uncertainty that is hypochondria, this book will be an illumination for anyone who has ever wondered if they are ill.’ – Adam Phillips, author of On Giving Up