March is Epilepsy Month, and we are honoured to be featuring an excerpt from Nora Gold’s new novella, In Sickness and In Health, which is part of a set of novellas published earlier this month by Guernica Editions.
The narrative around epilepsy has been, historically, fraught with misinformation and prejudice, and Nora explores this stigma and shame in her writing.
In Sickness and In Health & Yom Kippur in a Gym by Nora Gold (Guernica Editions, March 1, 2024)
As Nora explains, “When I was a child and teen about 55 years ago, medical knowledge was much less advanced, the drug treatments cruder and with more troubling side effects, and societal attitudes toward people with epilepsy were far less accepting. In general, people with epilepsy encounter a higher level of social stigma than people with other medical conditions because epileptic seizures – which can seem frightening and bizarre – were seen historically as evidence that an individual was possessed by a demon, and therefore evil. This moral condemnation of people with epilepsy persisted even after epilepsy was determined to be a neurological (and not a moral) disorder, but in some circles it still persists to this day.”
Thank you to Nora for writing this important story, and for sharing a bit of it with us here. You can grab a copy of In Sickness and In Health wherever books are sold, including your independent bookstore and directly from the publisher at Guernica Editions.
Excerpt from In Sickness and In Health
In ninth grade she turned fourteen, and on this birthday she was perfectly normal again. Her doctor had taken her off meds the year before, gushing over her progress – no seizures (or, as her father called them, dreams) for three years, and a good EEG – as though this was a personal achievement on her part like learning to high jump, and she now merited a reward. In any case, she was thrilled with the reward she received: an end to those horse pills, which had made her feel as monstrously big and ungainly as a horse. It took a couple of weeks to transition back to normal; and as this was occurring, she was acutely aware of the two different lives (drugged/abnormal and undrugged/normal) that she lived, the two realities she inhabited, and the two versions of herself, the two Lilys, that existed. She didn’t know back then that Tegretol, the pill she’d just been taken off of, was being prescribed also for schizophrenia, but she did feel that her life was schizophrenic. Joseph in the Bible – known as “Joseph the Dreamer” (if he “dreamed” so much, perhaps he, too, had epilepsy?) – had interpreted Pharaoh’s dream as meaning seven good years would be followed by seven bad ones. In her life she’d had three good years followed by three bad ones, then four good ones, then four more bad ones. And three and four added up to seven, just like the years in Joseph’s prophecy.
Now at age fourteen (two times seven), it was a relief and a joy to be Normal Lily again. Her own face looked back at her in the mirror, not the weird one swollen by medication. The awful fatigue and heaviness were gone, her body was coordinated, and at school she was friendly with her classmates and perceived as smart. In English they’d been reading Flowers for Algernon, a novel about an intellectually disabled man named Charlie who undergoes experimental surgery and briefly becomes a genius before the effects wear off and he returns to his original state. Lily – not that she thought she was a genius – identified deeply with Charlie’s transformation from moron to genius and back, even though in her case (the opposite of Charlie’s), the drugs made her stupider, not smarter. She produced a book report of such quality it surprised her English teacher, and also, when it got an A, her classmates, who knew she rarely invested effort in homework assignments. When someone asked her about this one, she replied cryptically, “Charlie’s life is a metaphor,” and turned away. Like Charlie, who’d observed his own transformation from stupid to smart and back to stupid, she was sometimes filled with dread at the likelihood, or even inevitability, that at some point – probably in four or five years, when some other incident happened and they put her back on drugs – she too would revert to moronhood. Her lifelong vacillation between on-pills and off-pills, stupid and smart, was like the flicking of a light switch on and off, and ensuing periods of light and darkness. Sometimes she wasn’t certain who, or what, she really was: dumb or smart, good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Maybe she was all these things.
Author Nora Gold. Photo credit: Yaal Herman
More about Nora:
Dr. Nora Gold is the author of four acclaimed books and the winner of two Canadian Jewish Book/Literary awards, as well as praise from Alice Munro. A former professor and an activist, Gold is the editor-in-chief of the prestigious literary journal Jewish Fiction .net, which has readers in 140 countries.
More about In Sickness and In Health. Lily had epilepsy as a child, so her most cherished goal has always been to be “normal”. By age 45 she has a “normal” life, including a family, friends, and an artistic career, and no one, not even her husband, knows the truth about her past. But now some cartoons she drew threaten to reveal her childhood secret, and destroy her marriage and everything she has worked so hard for. A moving novella about shame, secrets, disabilities, and the limits and power of love.
More about Yom Kippur in a Gym. Five strangers at a Yom Kippur service in a gym are struggling with personal crises. Lucy can’t accept her husband’s Parkinson’s diagnosis. Ira, rejected by his lover, plans suicide. Ezra is tormented by a mistake that ruined his career. Rachel worries about losing her job. Tom contemplates severing contact with his sisters. Then a medical emergency unexpectedly throws these five strangers together, and in one hour all their lives are changed in ways they would never have believed possible.