First Book Club: Hysteria (with Katerina Bryant)

“My illness is not a metaphor. Any amount of self-reflection in the world will not make it go away.”

Each month we celebrate an Australian debut release of fiction or non-fiction in the Kill Your Darlings First Book Club. For October that debut is Katerina Bryant’s Hysteria, out now from NewSouth Books.

When Katerina suddenly began experiencing chronic non-epileptic seizures, she was plunged into a foreign world of doctors and psychiatrists, who understood her condition as little as she did. Reacting the only way she knew how, she immersed herself in books, reading her way through her own complicated diagnosis and finding a community of women who shared similar experiences. In Hysteria, Bryant blends memoir with literary and historical analysis to explore women’s medical treatment throughout history.

Our November First Book Club title will be Lucky’s by Andrew Pippos (Pan Macmillan). Our theme song is Broke for Free’s ‘Something Elated’.

Further reading:

Read Ellen Cregan’s review of Hysteria in our October Books Roundup.

Read Katerina’s Shelf Reflection on her reading habits and the writing that inspires her.

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