How to Tell When We Will Die
Johanna Hedva
In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to ask: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can't get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, "Sick Woman Theory", became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism-a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies-we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.
How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva's paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal-from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America's byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness-relying on and fueling ableism-to the detriment of us all.
With the insight of Anne Boyer's The Undying and Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva's debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.
'A book for the moment and for the ages. It's questing, pissed, propulsive, funny, generous, pervy, and original-full of love and pain in all their entwined glory.' —Maggie Nelson
'In these sharp essays, novelist Hedva reflects on living with chronic illness . . .They push back against misogynistic associations between illness and a concept of femininity defined by weakness and fragility, instead asserting that “you don’t need to be fixed, my queens—it’s the world that needs the fixing.” Hedva’s philosophical takes on disability are consistently illuminating, even if the subject matter makes for heavy reading . . . Probing and sophisticated, this is worth seeking out.' — Publishers Weekly
Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Their novel On Hell was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018, and their writing has been published in Triple Canopy, frieze, and The White Review. Their art work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Performance Space New York; the Museum of Architecture and Design, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. In 2019, they released the album The Sun and the Moon, and in 2020 they released Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poetry, plays, and essays published by Sming Sming and Wolfman Books. Johanna’s second novel Your Love Is Not Good is forthcoming from And Other Stories in the US and the UK.