Mimi Khúc began thinking about “unwellness”, or the idea that we all struggle to be “well”, more than a decade ago. At the time, she was a graduate student and a new mother struggling with postpartum depression. She didn’t have the knowledge or language to talk about what she was feeling – she just felt like a bad mother to her daughter Elia.
Now Khúc is a scholar of Asian American, gender and disability studies, who surveys and questions the forces that contribute to our unwellness. Her new book dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss melds many forms – scholarship, essayistic passages about her own pain and creative exercises – to spur readers’ own reflections on unwellness.
“When you begin with the recognition that we are all unwell, that our unwellness is shaped by the structures around us, it changes everything,” says Khúc.
