What to write about?

I had the privilege of introducing Gigi Fenster's talk yesterday. Gigi is the author of the book Feverish, a book described as a memoir, because you have to know what shelf to put the book on in a library and bookshop, but it is not a memoir in the sense of it being an account of the author's life. It is a meditation on life, on family, friends, the medical history of understanding fever, the history of psychiatry and many other topics, but it is also a meditation on what a writer should write about when she faces writer's block. So Gigi's challenge was to explore what is fever, what people understood by the term over the centuries. She came across Julius Wagner- Jauregg, a now fortunately largely forgotten Austrian physician and psychiatrist who won the Noble Prize for what we know now as a totally misguided treatment of mental illness. In his time, however, Wagner-Jauregg was highly regarded, as were his ideas on euthanasia, National Socialism, and other beliefs that are now considered total rubbish. So the world changes, beliefs change, what is right and what is wrong changes, and as a writer, such changes make up wonderful fodder for subjects for a writer suffering from writer's block. The talk generated lots of questions and comments, and left people with lots of ideas. Perhaps the questions raised will spark more books, but at any rate it will prompt people to dwell into a book that is hard to describe, easy to read but challenging in it scope.