There’s Nothing Wrong With Her describes the unique hell of long Covid

Kate Weinberg’s 2019 debut The Truants was a mystery novel. But it was also a homage to the genre, inspired by Agatha Christie’s twisting plots and the dark atmospheres of Donna Tartt. A year later, the author became trapped in her own mystery plot – one much less enjoyable. Feeling faint, dizzy and riddled with aches, she was baffled, as a then 45-year-old woman in good health, about what was happening to her. Eventually, she was diagnosed with long Covid, and she found herself marooned in the no-man’s land of chronic illness, a plotless place with seemingly no way out, no cure, and no neat and tidy ending.

Now Weinberg has done what storytellers do: she’s written a novel about it. There’s Nothing Wrong with Her, published by Bloomsbury next week, is the story of Vita, a successful podcast producer who is now stranded in her new boyfriend’s bed with only her brilliantly named goldfish, Whitney Houston, for company. Vita is a name that literally means “life” – and she has been completely sapped of her life force. And as someone who was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome when I was younger – similar to long Covid in its symptoms and mystifying lack of treatment or cure – I found Weinberg’s novel perfectly captured the surreal, invisible state of being stuck between sickness and health.

I was in my last year of sixth form when I got ill, missing out on all the rite-of-passage rituals of saying goodbye to school as I spent endless days stuck in bed. And it’s all here, everything I remember from that time – when doctors weren’t sure what was wrong or how to make it go away. The work of it all: getting rest, trying to think positively, taking vitamins, falling down research wormholes on the internet. The anxiety that one hour of “being normal” might mean you can’t get out of bed for three days. The panic that you took your health for granted when you had it. The paranoia that no one believes you. The loneliness when, as Vita documents, “time collapses” and everyone else around you moves on; the subsequent loss of social confidence. The confusion as your perspective shrinks – what did it feel like to be “well”? The ways you start rearranging your own future, if this is what life is going to be now. You want to be patient, but patience takes energy. So does impatience.

Vita never knows if she is “a well person who is stalked by sickness, or a sick person who may never get well”. Everything suddenly becomes very binary. Particularly as the boyfriend she moved in with before falling ill is a doctor. Though Max tries to maintain sympathy for Vita, he spends his days analysing test results – and hers all look fine. But there are days that make The Pit – as she terms her sick den – a brighter place. If her energy permits, she goes to the flat above, where a dying woman – and her handsome house guest – make Vita feel alive again, partly through their shared need to tell stories about the people they have lost.

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When she is visited by the ghost of Italian poet Luigi da Porto, the originator of the Romeo and Juliet story, there is a sense that Vita’s condition – all that time spent with her own thoughts – might be putting her back in touch with her creativity. In her past life, when she was well and travelled the world, she wrote a screenplay about Luigi, one she’d desperately wanted to get made, but now she makes a podcast where celebrities come on to “package up their pain”. On the show, everyone’s narrative is reduced to a neat little story. (I smirked at the not-so-subtle critique of this subset of sycophantic inspo-podcasting.)

Vita’s new reality is a brutal reminder that we often can’t tell the stories of our lives in this way. Our days are messy, and our struggles can be cruel and ugly, often with no clear ending, no euphoric scene in which we rise like a phoenix from the flames. During her illness, she finds herself revisiting old relationships, attempting to process what happened to her sister Gracie, and wondering if her “ending up in the wrong story” wasn’t just the bit where she was struck down with a soul-destroying mystery illness. But the novel also – rightly – questions our perception of illness itself.

When Weinberg first wrote about her ordeal, she described the torture. “It feels like my whole system has been poisoned,” she said in a piece for the Daily Mail in 2021. But she went on to explore her shock at how so many of the long Covid community whom she got to know had been doubted or disbelieved. “There’s nothing wrong with her” doesn’t just mean the test results look fine. It means: she’s probably faking it. I found it embarrassing enough to be ill in a way that felt so ill defined. The idea that I could be making it up only heightened the shame. Around the time I was unwell, I remember Ricky Gervais had a joke in one of his stand-up sets about people with ME. I found it mortifying.

I was fortunate, at least in terms of narrative closure. About 10 years ago, I was diagnosed with a rare genetic condition – one of the major symptoms can be fatigue. It made me feel that I wasn’t mad – there actually was something wrong with me! – but then even that thought felt unfair, a falling into the trap of the medical world’s language of being sick or well, of illnesses being real or not. And even now, it’s a frustrating place to be. Even with a diagnosis, I sometimes look back on that year of sickness and wonder if it was all just in my head.

My condition, fortunately, is mild and manageable, but I’m still stuck with that internalised feeling of needing to play it down. People can’t see it, so what if they don’t believe me? How do I communicate it, without putting on a fussy performance of sickness – something that jars with me? Should I stop and rest sometimes, or is it better for me if I keep going – and, in doing so, keep my sense of my own capabilities free from any kind of limitations or labels?

As for Weinberg, last year she posted a joyful picture of herself on holiday, riding a horse on a sunny beach. She said that she was “90 per cent better – by which I mean that 90 per cent of the time I’m 100 per cent better”. This “grim and bafflingly bespoke” illness has left a shadow – but, as Weinberg described it, it has also brought transformation. “Chronic illness changes you,” she wrote. “I’ll never feel as carefree about my health again, but also never stop feeling as grateful.”

One of the things that Vita notes in the novel is that “most people, even the ones who love you, are weird around sickness”. And chronic sickness makes people especially weird. “Something about the fact that you are stuck, that you can’t deliver the reassuring narrative of ‘getting better’ feels unnatural, disturbing,” Vita explains. We don’t want to think about it, we don’t know what to say. Maybe we don’t want to read about it. But we should. From Virginia Woolf to Susan Sontag, illness has always been a topic worth of literary investigation – gnarly and uncomfortable, but also illuminating, full of hard-won wisdom from a difficult, topsy-turvy place.

In a separate post about There’s Nothing Wrong with Her, Weinberg explained that she wrote the novel in part because “I wanted to make damn sure that I hadn’t gone to that dark, juicy, funny, frightening – so frightening – world and come back empty-handed.” And she has. For me, writing about that time is not easy. Not just because of how conflicted I’ve always felt in sharing it as something “about me”, but in how hard it is to describe. Thinking about it has sent me back into that strange maze of wondering if I sound mad. And that’s what makes Weinberg’s novel so remarkable.

At just 256 pages, it is deceptive in its slim size: despite its interest in the messiness of our lives, it manages to organise articulate, important thoughts about illness and the politics of being sick. As funny as it is moving, this story about love and family also manages to interrogate the ideas we might have about ourselves – and how disorienting it can be when they’re wrong-footed. All of this and it’s never depressing. It has been praised by Sarah Jessica Parker and compared to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story about illness and female artistic confinement “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Not many books can do that. It is many things: a book about Vita, a book about life.

‘There’s Nothing Wrong with Her’ is out on 1 August, published by Bloomsbury