Pathemata by Maggie Nelson review – a writer’s attempt to describe chronic pain

Woolf said language ‘runs dry’ when it comes to convey the reality of illness. Here is an impressive effort to do just thatIn her landmark 1985 work, The Body in Pain, American essayist Elaine Scarry makes a case for the “unsharability” of pain and its resistance to language. “Physical pain,” she writes, “does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.” Sixty years earlier in On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf made her famous claim about h