The Wounded Storyteller

"Frank sees the value of illness narratives not so much in solving clinical conundrums as in addressing the question of how to live a good life."

“Arthur W. Frank’s second edition of The Wounded Storyteller provides instructions for use of this now-classic text in the study of illness narratives. At the remove of twenty years, the author sees that he was trying for not only an analytic study of illness narratives but also ‘self-healing . . . to assure myself I wasn’t crazy.’ By recognizing that his own illness incorporated all three of his canonical narrative types and then by adding to his typology, Frank reveals the evolution of his frames of thought about illness. Perhaps health is a mirage and illness is a natural state of being. Perhaps getting old and sick is the blue book price for living mortal lives. Frank has helped us all not just to accept but to revere these givens of our human predicament.”

“Arthur W. Frank has changed the way we think about storytelling and health care. His work champions a point of view long neglected and too often thought to be medically irrelevant. His penetrating essays on the human need to make sense and meaning from illness have become ‘required reading’ for many of us. This new edition of The Wounded Storyteller is most welcome.”

“A classic book. Illness touches us all—patients, providers, family, friends—and Arthur W. Frank shows how illness extends beyond bodies to shape the stories (personal and cultural) that we almost inevitably construct to explain and to contain it. The stories in turn often reshape the experience of illness. The Wounded Storyteller is thus an indispensable guide to the oddly familiar but alien territory we inhabit when we enter what Susan Sontag called ‘the kingdom of the ill.’ Now, with an extended new preface and afterword, a classic-plus.”