What Does It Feel Like? My beloved Anne’s fate foretold in the journey of Sophie Kinsella

What Does It Feel Like? My beloved Anne’s fate foretold in the journey of Sophie Kinsella

Sophie Kinsella, who wrote the Confessions of a Shopaholic books, died of a glioblastoma on Wednesday at the age of 55. A kind reader of my postings alerted me to the fate that she shared with my beloved Anne.

Sophie Kinsella was a bestselling British author renowned for her light-hearted and witty novels, pigeon-holed as “chick-lit.” Beyond the Shopaholic books, Kinsella wrote numerous standalone novels characterized, I’m told, by clever humour, engaging plots, and insights into modern life and relationships. She has sold over forty million copies of her books in more than sixty countries, her work has been translated into more than forty languages, and Confessions of a Shopaholic has been adapted for film.

Her last book, titled What Does It Feel Like?, gives an eyewitness account of her medical journey in thinly veiled fictitious form.

At one point, a doctor asks her, “Are you getting enough sleep?” The protagonist’s immediate response is given as internal dialogue. In her own head she says, “I crawl into bed at 8:00 tired out and nauseous and longing for oblivion. I wake up twelve hours later – or thirteen or fourteen. I’m greedy for sleep. I want only sleep. I seek unconsciousness like a crack addict seeking a hit.”

The above lines could have been spoken by my wife.