In her memoir written after the death of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion quotes Emily Post’s 1922 book of etiquette, lauding the “unfailing specificity” of its practical advice for the needs of the mourner: “It is also well to prepare a little hot tea or broth, and it should be brought them upon their return without their being asked if they would care for it. Those who are in great distress want no food, but if it is handed to them, they will mechanically take it, and something warm to start digestion and stimulate impaired circulation is what they most need.”

Rereading Didion’s book, I found myself longing for something I had not realized I wanted: some kind of shared, specific, practical language for recognizing the needs of the ill; to be handed proverbial tea or broth without having to identify the desire for myself when I am enveloped in fire or fog; an invisible rupture of the healthy, neat public self I present to the world; an acknowledgment of the disparity. Without wading into diagnostics, it is easy to understand why the hysterics were inclined to use a visual language devoid of ambiguity about how to receive them. It’s something I discussed with the late artist Carolee Schneemann: the elaborateness of Victorian mourning practices, colors and garments changed to indicate to others who the deceased was to the mourner, the time since the death had elapsed. These traditions were rigid, and expensive, but there is a fundamental graciousness in visually signaling the specificity of one’s distress to outsiders. Carolee, ever generous, spoke with me at length about writing this book. “Women’s history has a special psychodynamic of burying all the social structures that really made women hysterical,” she said. I think Freud would have agreed.

I can’t get Augustine out of my head, I told my mother. It was a convenient, imprecise line.

So, what’s the book about? she asked, to be polite.

My mind went blank; the fog set in, as though I were entirely unfamiliar with my object of obsession, naïve to her obvious significance and vibrancy. It’s the story of a woman who lacks the language to describe her physical experience, I told her.

Yes?

The story of how she could not untangle her sick physical symptoms from her despair, from her memories, which constantly creep back in, haunt her.

Ah.

And she participated in a hospital culture of performance and spectacle in order to gain some small amount of power. It’s all she can do, really: being this perfect, sick thing is essentially her job, which she’s rather good at—following this charismatic doctor Charcot. She wants to get better, but she never does. We will never know the source of what condemns Augustine to these performances, to this life. The silence between us thickens. I wait for her to point out that I am really just trying to write about myself, but she doesn’t.

The personal keeps seeping into the critical, refuses to be contained.

Augustine Gleizes is like all women of your generation, an older friend observed. Splintered, fragmented. On the one hand, she has quite tangibly improved her situation: she’s managed to seduce the giant Charcot, seduces him through being the perfect case, making the perfect spectacle of her pain. She ensnares Charcot, keeps him, builds a life for herself at the Salpêtrière that is better, more exhilarating, more applauded than any life she could have had outside the hospital. On the other hand, she is the one who suffers from it all; she can no longer tell if her attacks are imitations of states of being, a glimpse of the true state of her body and mind, or something extracted, dragged out by Charcot.

My own life is made of fragments, and that’s how it is with Augustine.