A Synthesizer of Complexities Within the American Medical-Industrial Complex: on The Paregoric Realism of Anna DeForest

In a piece on the craft of writing published by LitHub, novelist, palliative-care physician, and neurologist Anna DeForest proffers their literary position. “The writing I admire and aim to produce works in a language that is entirely without artifice. This means, to be direct, short blunt words without flourish, minimal description, limited internality, and a lot of direct observation of the external world. I prefer to write in the first person, for the same reason, an atheist stance—there is no one outside of the story, there is no place outside from which to tell it.” Now maybe I’m just an opponent of the intentional fallacy or maybe I’m one of those ‘even documentaries aren’t capital-R “Real”’ guys reminding you that it’s all in the framing, that ‘realism’ is both the greatest and the most basic writing trick there is, that of course anything/everything within the pages of a book is invented, fabricated, subjectivized, and debatable, that even nonfiction is fiction, yet still I marvel at the miniaturist word sculptures in DeForest’s first two novels, each pocketsized hardcovers of around 200 pages —A History of Present Illness (2022) and Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024).