Narrative Matters Essays Honored
November 4th, 2009
by
Ellen Ficklen
|
Narrative Matters, the personal essay section of Health Affairs, publishes firsthand stories that explore the personal, ethical, and moral issues of delivering or receiving health care—and that carry a health policy message within them. The essays are popular with the journal’s readers (many say that Narrative Matters is what they turn to first), and they receive a tremendous number of hits and downloads on the Health Affairs Web site. Happily, during the past several years, an increasing number of media outlets and readers have discovered this compelling, affecting, literary nonfiction being published in Health Affairs.
Now, in fall 2009, Narrative Matters authors and essays from 2008 have been honored in two national “best-of” publications. The Best American Medical Writing 2009 is the first in a new series from Kaplan Publishing featuring “the genre’s finest authors.” The inaugural edition, consisting of 23 essays, was edited by liver transplant surgeon and author Pauline Chen (herself a Narrative Matters author). Best American Medical Writing 2009 features pieces from the New Yorker, Newsweek, Harper’s, the New York Times, and two Narrative Matters pieces from Health Affairs. One, a split-voice narrative by Julie R. Rosenbaum, titled “Duality,” describes the exhausting life of an academic physician and parent, in the process raising questions about workplace policies. The other, an essay by Alok A. Khorana, titled “Disorientation,” is about an immigrant doctor, newly arrived from India, who discovers how it’s the little things that can be surprising.
The Best American Essays 2009, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, as in every previous year, includes a listing of “Notable Essays.” This venerable publication, which has been a staple in bookstores and nonfiction writing courses since 1986, invites a different guest editor to select a group of best essays each year (for the 2009 edition the editor was Mary Oliver), with the series editor, Robert Atwan, selecting a prestigious list of notable essays written in all fields and from across the United States. This year, his “Notable Essays of 2008” included a Narrative Matters essay by physician/professor Anjali Jain. Titled “Crossing the Atlantic,” the piece details how Jain, an American pediatrician living in England, found that her special-needs child wasn’t well diagnosed or cared for by the National Health Service. Eventually, she and her husband made a choice and found a solution—a very American one.
Three different voices, three different stories, all compellingly and beautifully told–and first appearing in the Narrative Matters section of Health Affairs in 2008. If you missed them then, we’re glad that these publishing accolades give us the chance to introduce them to you now in 2009.
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