I have many feelings about the ‘wellness’ industry (which I touched on here and here, but to save you reading, the theme is ‘skeptical’), so I pounced on Katherine Brabon’s latest novel, Cure.

The story focuses on a mother and daughter, Vera and Thea. Vera has suffered an unnamed chronic illness since she was a teenager and, as she watches her daughter’s health follow a similar path, Vera becomes increasingly preoccupied with a blog written by a woman named Claudia, a mother whose daughter also has a chronic disease.

Vera and Thea travel to Italy, to see where Vera’s family originates, and to chase a promised cure to heal Thea’s illness. During the trip, Thea writes in her journal, dwelling on the parallels between her and her mother’s life. Through her writing, Thea grapples with questions about control, loyalty, and identity.

And because her mother’s illness is older even than Thea, she doesn’t question its existence. She doesn’t question how her mother feels about it, as though to do this would be to ask about some fundamental, fixed aspect of her person – as if to ask why her hair is brown, why her hands are shaped the way they are.

The story shifts easily between Vera and Thea’s perspective, and also moves back-and-forth in time between the present, Vera’s childhood, and her pregnancy with Thea. The sections from Vera’s past provided context for her experience of caring and being cared for, and for family attitudes to illness.

Brabon has added some interesting complexities – Vera is married to a doctor (who obviously has faith in his profession), and she is a writer, creating identities and scenarios for brands to cater to the ‘ideal consumer’. In less skilled hands, these plot elements may have seemed too convenient, however, Brabon uses them lightly, allowing the reader to make their own assumptions. I could easily imagine the tension between Vera and her husband when she chooses the vitamin supplements and bone broth over what her doctor prescribed.

He says that he didn’t study for ten years to have Vera believe one anecdote held the miraculous answer.

Equally, despite Vera being a part of creating the online illusion of the ‘ideal’, she has an obvious blind-spot about wellness information and wellness influencers, and is in fact the ‘ideal’ consumer herself.

With her constant presence online, there was a kind of knowing, almost welcome flagellation at play. She could stop any time, she didn’t want to stop. She could see the manipulation, the curation; she wouldn’t be fooled. 

I understand people turning to wellness influencers for health information as a presentation of anxiety – when you become desperate for a cure, any option seems viable. Pain and desperation are powerful blinkers, and it’s the fact that the industry thrives on vulnerability and anxiety that I find difficult.

She was an educated woman, she believed in science, she valued rationality. Yet there was a question of how strong those qualities really were when squared up against one’s desperations and desires. She did not always know why she believed some things and discredited others, and why certain people held particular sway over her beliefs.

Brabon also builds in subtle contradictions. For example, at the beginning of Vera’s pregnancy –

She doubted her body’s capacity. This caused Vera to live in perpetual awareness of the body’s primacy in matters of fate, and of how difficult it was to actually make a difference by force of effort or will.

Ah yes, let’s overlook the fact that ‘water fasts’ or ‘juice cleanses’ is ‘effort’ and ‘will’, and in doing these things you are expecting a change in your body!

Likewise, is Thea’s confused understanding of her mother’s love – although Thea is questioning Vera’s cures, she also allows them, respecting her mother’s authority. It highlights the difficulty in actions that may be done with the best intention, but are nonetheless harmful. Is this showing love?

When Thea says to her, ‘Why do I have to take all this stuff?’ and Vera replies, ‘Because it will help you’, she does not want to think that she is complicit in a lie, or at least something she can’t prove to be true, proponent of a belief she does not have full confidence in. If anything, it is essential to strengthen her resolve and her faith in what she demands of her daughter.

I haven’t said much about Thea’s preoccupation with Claudia, however a line toward the end stood out, as it had me thinking about the online vs. the offline lives of all bloggers/ content creators/ influencers and their audience –

…the internet draws this side out of us: the spy, the copycat, the aspirant, the quiet liar.

I really enjoyed this book – it’s as strong as her last novel, Body Friend, but also reminded my of Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk.

3.5/5

In Venice, Thea tried her first coffee. It tasted like Nonno’s cigarette smoke, stony and bitter on her tongue.