In this blend of personal memoir, social history, and cultural criticism, Susan Griffin illuminates our understanding of illness. She explores its physical, emotional, spiritual, and social aspects, revealing how it magnifies our yearning for connection and reconciliation. Griffin begins with a gripping account of her own harrowing experiences with Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome, a seriously disabling illness that was at first misconstrued through the label psychosomatic.

Alongside her own story, Griffin weaves in her fascinating interpretation of the story of Marie Duplessis, popularized as the fictional Camille, a nineteenth-century courtesan whose young life was taken by tuberculosis.

In the old story, Griffin finds contemporary themes of "money, bills, creditors, class, social standing, who is acceptable and who not, who is to be protected and who abandoned." In our current economy, she sees "how to be sick can impoverish, how poverty increases the misery of sickness, and how the implicit violence of this process wounds the soul as well as the body."