The Long or the Post of It? Temporality, Suffering, and Uncertainty in Narratives Following COVID-19.

Long COVID affects millions of individuals worldwide but remains poorly understood and contested. This article turns to accounts of patients' experiences to ask: What might narrative be doing both to long COVID and for those who live with the condition? What particular narrative strategies were present in 2020, as millions of people became ill, en masse, with a novel virus, which have prevailed three years after the first lockdowns? And what can this tell us about illness and narrative and about the importance of literary critical approaches to the topic in a digital, post-pandemic age? Through a close reading of journalist Lucy Adams's autobiographical accounts of long COVID, this article explores the interplay between individual illness narratives and the collective narrativizing (or making) of an illness. Our focus on temporality and suffering knits together the phenomenological and the social with the aim of opening up Adams's narrative and ascertaining a deeper understanding of what it means to live with the condition. Finally, we look to the stories currently circulating around long COVID and consider how illness narratives-and open, curious, patient-centered approaches to them-might shape medicine, patient involvement, and critical medical humanities research.

Staying with Narrative: Stories of Shame and Gynecological Pain.

Storytelling is good for us-or so we are told. This article examines two memoirs, by Hilary Mantel and Susanna Kaysen, in which narrating experiences of gynecological pain provokes shame and deepens pain. By attending to shame as a textual presence, I intervene in a longstanding debate about how to make sense of pain and illness. Shame, I argue, reveals the presence of multiple (and often contrasting) illness narratives; I analyze these narratives, and their interplay, across Mantel's and Kaysen's memoirs. As scholarship moves beyond, past, or post-narrative, I urge us to stay: to interrogate the ways in which illness narratives interact-amplifying some stories and storytellers whilst fragmenting or silencing others-and to examine the responsibility we all have within this collective sense-making.

(Dis)respect and shame in the context of 'medically unexplained' illness.

A significant proportion of somatic symptoms remain, at present, medically unexplained. These symptoms are common, can affect any part of the body, and can result in a wide range of outcomes-from a minor, transient inconvenience to severe, chronic disability-but medical testing reveals no observable pathology. This paper explores two first-person accounts of so-called 'medically unexplained' illness: one that is published in a memoir, and the other produced during a semi-structured interview. Both texts are revelatory for their expression of shame in the context of encountering disrespect from healthcare professionals. The first section of my paper, clinical encounters, explores disrespect which, I argue, takes three interconnecting forms in these texts: disrespect for pain when it is seen as 'medically unexplained', disrespect for the patient's account of her own pain, and disrespect for the patient herself. The second section elucidates the shame that occurs as an affective and embodied consequence of encountering such disrespect. I claim that patients living with so-called 'medically unexplained' illnesses suffer a double burden. They endure both somatic and social suffering-not only their symptoms, but also disrespectful, traumatic and shame-inducing experiences of healthcare systems. I conclude with a reflection on the urgent need for changes in clinical training that could improve the quality of life for these patients, even in the absence of an explanation, treatment or cure for their symptoms.