A journalist loses a month to an illness that presented as psychiatric and turned out to be autoimmune, and reconstructs the month afterwards from medical records, hospital video and other people’s accounts.
The reconstruction is what makes it work. She cannot remember it, so the book is reported rather than recalled, and the gap between how she experienced it and how it looked from outside is the actual subject.
The uncomfortable question it raises is how many people with the same condition are simply committed and never diagnosed.
Read March 2015.