Ok.J. Ramsey’s The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir of What Pleasure Can Survive (Convergent Books; Might 2026) was, upon publication, Amazon’s high new launch within the class of “Demise.”

In her memoir, Ok.J. Ramsey describes with brutal honesty her expertise with continual sickness, medical gaslighting, and trauma throughout her younger grownup years. Though Ramsey has been to hell and again, she has simply as a lot to say about hope as she does struggling. She is “not simply preventing illness [but] preventing despair.”

The challenge of Ramsey’s memoir echoes the sentiment expressed by Susan Sontag in her seminal ebook Sickness as Metaphor: “Everybody who’s born holds twin citizenship, within the kingdom of the properly and within the kingdom of the sick.” Ramsey begins her ebook within the kingdom of the properly: on a street journey out west with an in depth pal, she was the healthiest she’d ever been in her grownup life. However her state of grace shortly turns.

Earlier than Ramsey turned critically in poor health, she and her husband had been hoping to develop their household by having a child. Then medical horror rained fireplace upon their lives. After a yr of frequent anaphylaxis and not sure diagnoses — did she have lupus? Ankylosing Spondylitis? Each? — she sought assist on the Mayo Clinic. Her physique was lined in stretch marks, not from carrying new life however from instantly gaining over fifty kilos, the brutal aspect impact of excessive dose steroids. She had not been given knowledgeable consent on the potential penalties of her remedies. The steroids, those that will save her life, would additionally result in her bones changing into necrotic.

Ramsey is a trauma therapist and the creator of two different books about recovering from religious abuse. She left the high-control faith of her youth and has spent a lot of her profession aiding others in recovering from abuse in religion areas. In The Place Between Our Pains, she discusses the sacrifices continual sickness has required of her. Dropping her well being meant dropping her autonomy, as she relied on relations to help her with mobility and primary, each day duties like utilizing the toilet. Ramsey’s life turned consumed with medical remedies, and she or he was compelled into pausing her medical observe. After so a few years of giving care to others, she needed to discover ways to grow to be the recipient of care.

Ramsey curses early and infrequently in her memoir, even offering analysis concerning the psychological advantages of swearing. This characteristic contributes to the relatable tone of her narrative. Her prose is each direct and lyrical. In writing a few medical gadget (a port) that just about killed her, she invokes pure imagery: “We spend many years constructing careers that may purchase us houses of wooden and brick and stone, however one thing smaller than an eyeball can burn the house of our our bodies proper now.” She makes use of alliteration, telling the reader that fireside doesn’t simply burn — it may well additionally construct. She examines a hollowed out redwood, a decayed house turned domicile, “dwelling to bats and birds and bears.” On this method, she envisions her infected physique as an area nonetheless hospitable to considerable life.

The memoir is sectioned in 4 components, every with cinematic vignettes. Half one opens with a street journey. On this part, the reader spends time within the pure world — tenting and swimming and climbing — and the place-based prose feels much like the character writing of Annie Dillard or the travelogues of Cheryl Strayed. However then, within the latter components, we descend into the chilly and medical partitions of numerous hospitals, and her story of sickness is paying homage to Sarah Manguso’s Two Sorts of Decay and Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms.

Ramsey’s perspective turns into most distinct as she interprets her expertise of bodily fragility and the failures of the medical system by way of the lens of religion. Not happy-go-lucky, glass half-full religion — however hope-filled, however. Her narrative is just not rooted in poisonous positivity however in studying to reside within the “skinny locations,” these liminal areas the place ache and pleasure coexist, the place limits enable for the flourishing of affection.