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Mellitus: Essays on Up/Rooting
Paperback
Biographies GeneralLetters & Essays
Publisher Price: $20.00
Publisher: Howling Bird Press
Published: Oct 20 2026
Pages: 102
Language: English
This beautiful collection hangs together like poetry, offering a condensed yet fully satisfying reflection on chronic illness and its impact on relationships and hope. Jussel's admirable lyricism and economy make this a collection to return to and savor.
--Sonya Huber, author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys
Mellitus is a work of extraordinary unity--even as it acknowledges our ruptures, gaps, and failures. Jussel shows us both her body's destruction and its resilience. She makes us feel what we often take for granted: that the body is the site and source of our minds, our futures, and our connection to one another. In her hands, the syringe is not just a tool, but an experience to be shared.
--Jonathan Gleason, author of Field Guide to Falling Ill
In Mellitus, essayist Jenn Jussel beckons us into a thicket: a wilderness of illness, disability, and vulnerability that we all share, and through which she serves as expert guide. In language both lush and controlled, Jussel writes towards a new understanding of diabetes--a personally, intellectually, and emotionally rigorous one. The investigation of this beautiful, genuine book moves generously, considering alongside an illness a mother, a collection of fellow sufferers, a cured woman in Tianjin, China, a story conveyed in a dentist's office, a doctor prone to sharing nightmarish stories of children found dead in bed from Jussel's own ailment. The result is a book that will rewrite readers' understandings of diabetes, a disease that, as Jussel notes, is on the rise, but remains pitied, partially concealed, misunderstood, and deeply individualized by all things American healthcare. All the sweetness of my life has passed through the siphon of illness, Jussel writes--and this text, in a distilled yet rangy form, illustrates the pain and beauty of this nearly lifelong experience.
--Lucy Schiller, author of Aging Out
In the tradition of Anne Boyer, Porochista Khakpour, and Alice Wong, Jenn Jussell's medical memoir of intellectual and emotional depth is at once a work of personal inquiry and a manifesto for a better U.S. healthcare system. Her acknowledgement of her diabetic body unfolds in a Texas lush with thickets of live oak and cypress trees. Jussell's prose is lean and candid, as she chronicles her experiences living with chronic illness and the various ways diabetes has paradoxically created both distance and depth in her relationships. I admire Jussell's meditative, wise essays that invite me to reflect on the most fundamental aspect of human embodiment, our corporeal selves, that through illness, age, or accident, let in grief and vulnerability, but importantly, also let in joy and connection.
--Kathryn Savage, author of Groundglass
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