Award-Winning Fiction Writer Alethea Black on Recovering from Mold-Related Illness
Award-winning fiction writer Alethea Black has published a humorous story about her experiences recovering from mold-related illness in the online magazine Narrative.
The story is called “How to Lose Everything in Twelve Easy Steps,” and the section related to mold starts out:
Step Five: Find mold in your attic, mold in your basement, mold behind your walls. You’ve always thought that people who suffered from environmental illness were hypochondriacs, so this is karmic payback: now you’re one of them.
Your beloved house, with its wood-burning stove and wraparound deck and panoramic views of the lake—your house is as sick as you are. This house was your first major purchase in life, and when you bought it, you felt so safe, so free, so much like an adult that after the movers drove away, you lay on the floor between the stacks of boxes and cried.
Now the inspectors come in their protective clothing and show you all the different types of mold you have, all the colors, where it lurks.
Read everything that has ever been written about mold sickness. Study the inspectors’ report. Talk to other people who’ve gone through the same thing—not Suzanne Somers, but the less famous people.
Here is her biography:
Alethea Black was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard in 1991. Her debut story collection, I Knew You’d Be Lovely (Broadway, 2011), was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program and as Book of the Week on Oprah.com. A finalist in Narrative’s Spring 2009 and Winter 2011 Story Contests, and the winner of the 2008 Arts & Letters Prize, Black lives in LA County, California.
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