‘We are all unwell’: a scholar’s radical approach to health

Mimi Khúc discusses the concept of unwellness and how it is shaped by the structures around us in a new book, dear elia

Mimi Khúc began thinking about “unwellness”, or the idea that we all struggle to be “well”, more than a decade ago. At the time, she was a graduate student and a new mother struggling with postpartum depression. She didn’t have the knowledge or language to talk about what she was feeling – she just felt like a bad mother to her daughter Elia.

Now Khúc is a scholar of Asian American, gender and disability studies, who surveys and questions the forces that contribute to our unwellness. Her new book dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss melds many forms – scholarship, essayistic passages about her own pain and creative exercises – to spur readers’ own reflections on unwellness.

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