Gigi Fenster: Feverish

Gigi Fenster gave up a career as a lawyer to write. She enrolled in a creative writing course, completed a Masters, then a PhD programme, but ran out of inspiration. The stories wouldn't come. She was not a Gigi Grisham who could turn out pot boilers about crooked lawyers. She never expected to make enough money to recoup the cost of her writing courses. She read. The bibliography at the back of her book would put off most creative writing students who think that creative writing is about letting your imagination roam. Gigi's imagination was in the doldrums. She was preoccupied with her family, her children, her psychiatrist father, her friends with their own problems. This was what she knew, this is what she decided to write about. She thought that if she could induce a fever that would kick her imagination into gear, so she explored the history of medicine and what people knew about fever. If illness was all in the mind, she explored the history of psychiatry. Above all, she looked at her own history, the grandfather who moved from his shtetl somewhere in darkest Eastern Europe to Vienna to study medicine and shared his lecture theatre with Sigmund Freud and Julius von Wagner-Jauregg, two pioneering psychiatrists, whose treatments were at the opposite end of the spectrum, empathy and understanding versus ruthless and painful coercion. Somehow the same issue cropped up in Pat Barker's Regeneration, which I have read recently, far too belatedly. In that, one doctor tried to rehabilitate his psychologically damaged patients with care and sympathy, while another tortured his patients until they preferred the trenches and front battle lines to the psychological treatment. Reading Feverish is like being part of a random conversation. I kept thinking, I know what you are talking about, I know someone like that, I've been there, done that. It is described as a 'memoir', but it lacks the structure of a memoir, this happened, then that happened. It is a collection of incidents, imagined conversations, reflections about books, and in particular, Wuthering Heights. There is more to it than the chatty style would indicate. Listen to Kim Hill's interview with Gigi Fenster.