"To be sick and helpless is a humiliating experience. Prolonged illness also carries the hazard of narcissistic self-absorption."

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Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

— Adam Gopnik