The health memoir is, you might say, in tiptop condition. Robust, even. The section the genre occupies in bookshops – normally towards the back of the store, a safe distance from Jack Reacher and those Thursday Murder Club people – tends to enjoy consistent footfall, the carpet running threadbare as prospective readers loiter and mooch, browsing at length.
They are, invariably, spoilt for choice. Each month seems to offer ever more first-person accounts of living with cancer, or surviving cancer; those who have gone through a psychotic episode, or else have been diagnosed – or reliably misdiagnosed – with one of the many chronic conditions whose NHS pages offer such scant information. These are books that take confusion and distress as their starting points, but are filled with the indefatigable human spirit of survival. (Crucially, none possess the hectoring tone of its close cousin, the self-help tome.)
