I Told You Was Ill

Do you worry that spots are cancerous? That headaches are caused by tapeworm larvae burrowing into your brain? That shoulder twinges are cardiovascular accidents waiting to happen?

If so, you’re almost certainly a hypochondriac. But don’t worry about. As this hilarious book shows, hypochondria is the only sane response to modern life – and illness in itself (hurrah!), and part of a noble tradition of neurosis stretching back thousands of years. From Darwin to Tolstoy, many of history’s greatest writers and thinkers have been incorrigible hypochondriacs. They understood what too many of us have forgotten: that you can only get better by imagining the worst. So let’s do it!

“This short, witty and beautifully observed book is going to have you laughing all the way to your likely early grave...”
James Delingpole, <em>Daily Mail</em>

“Not only is O'Connell a marvellously sympathetic narrator, half-humorous and half-hysterical, he can actually make you anxious as you read.”
<em>Scotland on Sunday</em>

“A shamelessly endearing memoir of imagined illness”
Zoe Williams

About John O’Connell

John O’Connell worked for years – far, far too long – at the London listings magazine Time Out, where he was books editor. Since being made redundant on the grounds that ‘no-one really reads books anymore’, he has been writing, mostly about books, for The Times, The Guardian, New Statesman and The National. He is the author of I Told You I Was Ill: Adventures in Hypochondria (Short Books, 2005). He is 37 and lives in south London with his wife and two children.