What's Wrong?

Starred review from November 15, 2023
Williams examines the disparities in the American health care system and what it means to experience chronic pain through thoughtful prose and affecting illustrations. The author reports that 20% of Americans suffer from chronic pain. She is one of them, and her pain lies at the intersection of trauma, alcoholism, ulcers, heartburn, and more. Despite the endless doctors' appointments and prescriptions, "I still live without meaningful relief or medical consensus." Sadly, this experience is common for many of the 50 million Americans who deal with chronic pain. Williams also shows how women, transgender individuals, and people of color suffer disproportionately from the failings of health care professionals. Navigating a system built for white, cisgender men, many other demographics find that their symptoms are confounding or outright dismissed by doctors. Through four case studies and accounts from her many frustrating experiences, Williams applies personal narratives to the statistics, exploring the intersectionality of pain and its mental, physical, and emotional toll. With her prior experience working in oncology, she's able to view medicine from the perspective of both patient and practitioner. Her empathetic storytelling delivers far more complexity and nuance than a medical diagnosis would offer. Importantly, there's hope to be found here. In addition to providing an essential recording of suffering, Williams delivers a call to action. With compelling prose accompanied by gorgeous illustrations, she shows us that "art has as much to tell us about illness as medicine does. Pain, like art, isn't fixed, passive, or inert." The colorful illustrations are testament to the care that's required in healing. Medicine is part of that care, but only one part. Care requires more than just clinical evaluations, she writes; it "requires that trauma, whether personal, intergenerational or systemic, is addressed." A passionate, memorably presented manifesto for healing.

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Starred review from December 2, 2023

Chronic pain, especially women's pain, is often overlooked or undertreated by the medical community, as explicated by Williams (Commute) through five devastating accounts. Dee had congenital abnormalities, childhood sexual abuse plus abusive parenting, continual torment from fibromyalgia, and finally bladder cancer. Growing up queer, Rain was born with a genetic abnormality that reduced her ability to fight infection, eventually identifying as a disabled, nonbinary trans woman amid chronic pain. Child gymnast Alex was sexually abused by doctor Larry Nassar under the guise of "treatment," developing endometriosis and other agonizing disorders afterwards. Adriana fell into alcohol and substance addictions after extensive physical and emotional abuse as a child and subsequent depression. Herself belittled, bullied, and sexually assaulted in childhood, Williams hurt like "my body was trying to kill me," despite her dogged but unsuccessful journey through medical treatments. Her limpid, disturbing artwork proffers striking visual metaphors: a doctor's head topping a Pez dispenser of drugs, a ghost hooked up to an IV, statistics embodied by columns of bloodstained women, a woman without a torso embracing her own skeleton. VERDICT The raw accounts of these five tormented women reveal a disturbingly ineffective health system. Vital for health collections in public and university libraries.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 15, 2024
If Western medicine tends to overlook patients’ individual lived experiences, this powerful collection of illustrated personal histories from Williams (Commute) embodies a protest of sorts. Framed by the artist’s own narrative of chronic mental and physical illnesses, the stories spotlight four people whose conditions were made worse by the professionals and systems meant to help them. Dee is a Brooklyn-born woman from a Jamaican family, whose circuitous navigation of a racist medical system may have led to a delayed diagnosis of bladder cancer. Rain is a queer trans woman with a primary immunodeficiency syndrome that primarily affects genetic males; her diagnosis leaves her struggling financially and her identity in a state of flux. Alex, one of the elite gymnasts sexually abused by former U.S.A. women’s national team doctor Larry Nassar, struggles to separate joy (the endorphins of a backflip) from dread (of the “hundreds of ‘treatments’ ” she received from Nassar). Williams, herself a former cancer researcher, once made science her “entire personality.” Here she cites systemic failures of medicine, but her thesis is ultimately existential: medicine can be part of care, she posits, but true care requires community. Intricate watercolors and flattened digital art depict the feelings that science cannot: bodies falling through space, rendered animalistic, ghostly, monstrous—but also occasionally flourishing, when care for the soul is part of the process. Though these portraits can be harrowing, they offer solidarity and uplift to those who’ve felt marginalized by the medical system. Agent: Paul Lucas, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.