A History of Present Illness

The novel opens with a young woman putting on a white coat for her first day as a student doctor. From there, it follows her through cadaver dissection, surgical and psychiatric rotations, difficult births, sudden deaths, and a budding relationship—call it romance-adjacent—with a seminarian. The long hours and heartrending work blur the lines between the unnamed narrator’s new life as a physician and the lifelong traumas she is fleeing.

Written in brilliant, wry, and biting prose, A History of Present Illness is a boldly honest meditation on the body, the hope of healing in the face of total loss, and what it means to be alive. It’s also a mystery novel, one that will keep readers guessing as to who the narrator really is—physician or patient?

Anna DeForest is a neurologist and palliative care specialist who also holds an MFA from Brooklyn College. Her writing has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Paris Review, among others. Her debut novel, A History of Present Illness, won the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives and works in New York City.

For Anna DeForest, A History of Present Illness began not with the sound of a voice speaking but with “the wound, the pain that calls the speaker to attention.” In this podcast, she talks about how writing informs her work as a medical doctor, and vice versa.

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Join us

Anna DeForest will be at Colgate on Thursday, Oct. 5, at 4:30 p.m. EDT. Join us physically in the Persson Hall auditorium or register to join us virtually via Zoom. The in-person audience will be able to participate in a post-reading Q&A and book-signing. Everyone is welcome. Admission is free.

Want to find out what thoughtful readers are saying about A History of Present Illness? Join Colgate faculty and students on Monday, Oct. 30, from 7-8 p.m. EDT for a conversation about all three October Living Writers books. (No preparation is necessary; there’s no need to have read all the books in order to participate.) Register here.

Go beyond the book

“Her writing is dreamlike and fragmentary, a sequence of vivid scenes that the reader must piece together, like a puzzle, to understand who exactly is telling us this story,” writes Ellen Barry in this New York Times review of Anna DeForest’s debut novel.
Booklist calls A History of Present Illness “one of the best in the 'making of a doctor' genre.”
“The early aspects of medical training … really are an indoctrination. You're not just learning science. You're learning a different way of being a person.” Listen to Anna DeForest speak with NPR about what she learned, and unlearned, in medical school.
“[D]octors care poorly for patients who are on the way out, and they wait too long to talk with the dying about death,” writes Anna DeForest in this personal essay on palliative care.