Clare Beams is the author of the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Fiction Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. With her husband and two daughters, she lives in Pittsburgh.
LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • A NEW
YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
“Brilliant, suspenseful. . . . A masterpiece.” —Elizabeth Gilbert,
author of City of Girls
"Astoundingly original.” —The New York Times Book Review
“This is Alcott meets Shirley Jackson, with a splash of Margaret
Atwood. . . . Unusual and transporting.” —Washington Post
“A meticulously crafted suspense tale seething with feminist fury.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Masterfully considered. . . . Clare Beams’ cool, cutting prose
hypnotically evokes the oppression of female bodies and minds.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Part horror, part case study and . . . part feminist polemic. . .
. [The novel’s antagonist] is a true and timeless 21st century
villain.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Both savagely acute in its portrayal of misogyny and tenderly
hopeful in its trajectory.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“[This] gripping novel meditates on how an all-male establishment
can denying women’s pain, and how the consequences can shape a
society.” —Vanity Fair
“Expertly blends 19th-century and modern diction. . . . Steering
[her] protagonist toward liberation, [Beams] seem to suggest that
an honest reckoning with misogyny might produce not only
solidarity, but also change.” —The Atlantic
“Frightening, suspenseful, and timely, The Illness Lesson explores
the crushing weight of oppression and the indefatigable power of
female defiance.” —Esquire
“A haunting psychological thriller about society’s preoccupation
with controlling women’s minds and bodies. . . . [An] arresting,
beautifully written debut novel.” —Newsday
“An astonishing book. . . . Beams shows a kind of mastery in yoking
the natural to the surreal and linking grief and fear to rage.”
—New York Journal of Books
“Provocative. . . . A scathing indictment of early toxic
masculinity, a measured diatribe against male-dominated medical and
educational institution.” —The Washington Independent Review of
Books
“Clare Beams’ writing is a revelation. . . . A fascinating mix of
genres (the school story, body horror, paean to feminist anger),
[The Illness Lesson] manages to achieve all the things that the
best historical fiction should.” —Irish Independent
“Beams takes risk after risk in this, her first novel, and they all
seem to pay off. Her ventriloquizing of the late 19th century, her
delicate-as-lace sentences, and the friction between the unsettling
thinking of the period and its 21st century resonances make for an
electrifying read.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Luminous. . . . This suspenseful and vividly evocative tale
expertly explores women's oppression as well as their sexuality
through the eyes of a heroine who is sometimes maddening, at
othertimes sympathetic, and always wholly compelling and
beautifully rendered." —Booklist (starred review)
“Daring. . . . [A] powerful and resonant feminist story.”
—Publishers Weekly
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