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HYPOCHONDRIACS

THE bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. WITH so much real and terrible illness in the world, it is not easy to find sympathy for the imaginary variety.

After all, it is only the genuinely sick who ever display bravery and stoicism; the fantasists always make such a song and dance about things.

Presumably there is no point in putting it on if there’s no drama involved. And according to my lifelong, observational and entirely nonscientific studies, hypochondriacs outlive the rest of us by two decades.

We should presume they have their reasons for carrying on so and find sympathy for the psychological disturbance lies behind it.

If you’d prefer just to laugh about it, then Jerome K. Jerome is your man. Three Men In A Boat opens with J, the narrator, recalling a visit to the British Museum, where he was leafing through a medical dictionary — as people did before the internet — and found, to his dismay, that he had everything going. From ague to zymosis, he had the lot.

The only complaint of which he was inexplicably free was housemaid’s knee: ‘I had walked into that reading room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.’

Rose, in Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, can’t even crawl. No doctor has been able to explain it, but her daughter Sofia is determined to solve this medical mystery.

The two women travel to Spain to the clinic of the curious Dr Gomez in a last attempt to discover the truth.

All sorts of things are revealed to them out there in the desert; none are what they had expected to find.

The Home-Maker — another vintage cracker from the Persephone imprint — was radical when it was written in 1924 and still feels revolutionary.

Eva is a good mother, but madly conscientious and deeply unhappy. When her husband is injured at work, she becomes the breadwinner and the whole family starts to blossom.

But how can they continue this arrangement when he starts to recover? Perhaps faking it has its uses after all.