Cover design by Jessica Horrocks (2020) Image description: Blue book cover with title ‘SHOW ME WHERE IT HURTS: Living with Invisible Illness’. Author name ‘Kylie Maslen’. The book title is drawn to recreate a pain chart. — *Cover design by Jessica Horrocks (2020)*

Image description: Blue book cover with title ‘SHOW ME WHERE IT HURTS: Living with Invisible Illness’. Author name ‘Kylie Maslen’. The book title is drawn to recreate a pain chart.

My body dictates who I am. I work the way I do because of my body, I vote the way I do because of my body and I live the way I do because of my body. It is not my body that is at fault, but society’s failure to deal with bodies like mine. I might be in pain, but I am whole. I refuse to have the difficult parts cropped out.

Kylie Maslen has been living with invisible illness for twenty years—more than half her life. Its impact is felt in every aspect of her day-to-day existence: from work to dating; from her fears for what the future holds to her struggles to get out of bed some mornings.

Drawing on pop music, art, literature and online culture, Maslen explores the lived experience of invisible illness with sensitivity and wit, drawing back the veil on a reality many struggle—or refuse—to recognise. Show Me Where it Hurts: Living with Invisible Illness is a powerful collection of essays that speak to those who have encountered the brush-off from doctors, faced endless tests and treatments, and endured chronic pain and suffering. But it is also a bridge reaching out to partners, families, friends, colleagues, doctors: all those who want to better understand what life looks like when you cannot simply show others where it hurts.

READ AN EXTRACT published in the Sunday Life liftout of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald

Selected reviews:

‘[Kylie Maslen’s] confessional style helps illuminate the misogyny of a medical establishment that frequently disbelieves or underplays women’s health problems…Show Me Where It Hurts is a timely and engaging essay collection for readers of nonfiction that’s unflinching yet compassionate, such as Clare Bowditch’s Your Own Kind of Girl and Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women.’ – Carody Culver, Books+Publishing
‘Maslen speaks as eloquently about SpongeBob SquarePants and finding community online as she does about the inherently ableist structures of aged care, the medical system and the economy. Show Me Where It Hurts rejects the sympathy of the reader as much as it evokes their empathy and understanding. Maslen’s breadth of knowledge and willingness to frame her arguments within her lived experience make her a compelling writer.’ – Bec Kavanagh, Readings Books
‘Maslen’s book is sharp and defiant, told through a prism of pop culture and delivered with a punch, reinforcing the debilitating pain that so often consumes her.’ – Gabrielle Jackson, Guardian Australia
‘Maslen’s essays entwine personal reflection and storytelling with discussions of pop culture as diverse as Spongebob Squarepants, internet memes, Beyonce, and Sally Rooney. These pop cultural lenses effectively use the cultural zeitgeist to describe experiences that can be otherwise exasperatingly abstract, intangible, and invisible. … The essays will be immediately relatable to the many millions of us who encounter chronic illness, and offer an important translation for those who don’t. 4 Stars ★★★★’ – Erin Stewart, Arts Hub
‘In Show Me Where It Hurts, Maslen uses pop culture as a lens through which to view her health. … It’s a clever device which connects to one of the central ideas of Maslen’s narrative: that her struggles can be attributed not only to the breakdown of her body, but also the failure of broader societal structures to address her needs adequately.’ – Gemma Nisbet, The West Australian
‘With almost unbearable honesty Show Me Where It Hurts charts the writer’s day-to-day experiences of pain, chronic and invisible illness, and mental ill health, and the road to her diagnoses. … It’s this chronicling of a life lived in pain combined with her insights into the structures of work, ableism and housing, as well as the representation of mental ill health, disability and illness in books, TV, movies and more, that makes Maslen’s book so incisive. The deeply personal is also political.’ – Miriam Kauppi, Broadsheet
‘Maslen's book feels comparable to works such as Fiona Wright's The World Was Whole or Katerina Bryant's Hysteria; to Michaela Coel's series I May Destroy You or Hannah Gadsby's Nanette. Indeed, her writing harnesses the same kind of vertiginous style that made Gadsby's breakthrough so resonant: examining problems until, having categorically exhausted them, there is nowhere left to go. … Show Me Where It Hurts – particularly during its earlier pieces, with their interpolations of everything from SpongeBob and A$AP Rocky to Lorde and Frida Kahlo – often manages a kind of heady brilliance.’ – Declan Fry, Sydney Morning Herald
‘There are shades here of Elaine Scarry’s contention that pain breaks language, but Maslen’s approach is visceral, practical. It has to be. Theory would be a privilege. She navigates the urgent, sublimated world of pain’s inexpressibility in ways that are fresh and inventive. More importantly, they are the authenticities of the life she lives.’ – Kate Crowcroft, Australian Book Review (review also available in audio)
‘Maslen interrogates what a fulfilled life looks like, inviting readers to reflect on their own body, how it is perceived and the structures that enable, or inhibit, one’s choices. … Show Me Where It Hurts speaks to those living with scars, while urging those with no lived experience of chronic illness and disability to question their preconceptions.’ – Shu-Ling Chua, Saturday Paper ($)
‘[Katerina Bryant’s Hysteria] and Maslen’s [Show Me Where It Hurts], committed to redressing the faulty historical record on women’s suffering and pain, are a corporeal rebellion. They lay bare the exhaustion occasioned by capitalism’s resource extraction, the unyielding walls of our workplaces and institutions, and the misogyny, latent or overt, of medical practice. In writing of their chronic and mental illnesses, the authors rupture the narrative that a successful body is a well body, and open a space for new and original accounts of how those bodies mediate the world.’ – Jessica White, Sydney Review of Books
‘Show Me Where it Hurts is an important book … Finally we’re through with ‘inspiration porn’ (a term coined by Australian disability activist Stella Young, whom Maslen refers to time and again) and we can look towards books like this for honest, ferocious examinations that normalise rather than pedestalise, advocate rather than purport victory. I have no doubt this book will put Maslen in high demand and we’ll be seeing her name more and more.’ – Heather Taylor-Johnson, Rochford Street Review
‘There is no happy ending or grand conclusions on offer. Rather, Maslen’s story is one of acceptance coupled with the radical pursuit to find beauty in the quiet; to survive and cultivate an understanding of one’s self and one’s body amid the state’s inability to do so. At this point, it’s possible that this is all that one can do and it’s a feat that Maslen has taken on and documented remarkably.’ – Laura La Rosa, InDaily
‘Maslen doesn’t waste time painstakingly deconstructing the dangerous prevailing tropes of illness. Rather, she exposes them as utterly bereft, by focusing instead on weaving together acutely honest accounts of her own life with astute takes on pop music, film, television, internet communities and visual art. … Pain can be incredibly isolating. But those in pain can be further isolated, further pained, by the loss of their ability to give voice to their experience. Breaking that cycle with memoir, criticism, revelation and questioning, Maslen, and others writing with grit and wisdom, not only foster our empathy and understanding but spur us towards solidarity, to work together for a world of radical care.’ – Andy Jackson, Meanjin
‘Maslen connects with readers, especially those of her own generation, with her daring honesty. The author discusses sex, loneliness, mental health struggles and the burden of chronic pain as well as pop icons, her favorite TV shows, books and movies. … It is this combination of different approaches to the same topic that enable the book to be a refreshingly accurate description of an entire life, warts and all, of a person just like any other Millennial—having to deal with the burden of chronic illnesses on top of it all.’ – Alekszandra Rokvity, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

Coverage:

PRESS AND ONLINE INTERVIEWS:

Stories of Pain and Empathy: In conversation with Katerina Bryant for The Adelaide Review
First Person: Interview for The Advertiser’s SA Weekend supplement
Finding Power Through Pain: Interview for City Mag Adelaide
A New Australian Book Lays Bare Life With Chronic Illness, With a Side of Beyonce: Broadsheet
On bipolar, pop culture criticism and paths to diagnoses: Interview with Sam Twyford-Moore for the University of Toronto Press
Show Your Workings: Sharing my writing routine for Kill Your Darlings
My writing process and current influences: Interview with Unity Books Auckland
Hardware, software and conspiracy memes: Interview with Uses This on my working style and needs
Living with complex illness and surviving to tell about it: The oeuvre of Australian memoirs focussing on complex mental illness

RADIO AND PODCAST INTERVIEWS:

On Living with Invisible Illness: Live-to-air on Radio National’s Life Matters
Show Me Where It Hurts: Live-to-air on Radio Adelaide’s breakfast show
Show Me Where It Hurts: Live-to-air on Triple R’s Breakfasters (time code 2:43-53)
Show Me Where It Hurts: Live-to-air on Radio Melbourne Afternoons (time code 2:08-50)
Online communities, sex and dating, and the power of pop culture: Podcast for inform
Dismantling ableist ideas around work and worth: Interview with Madeleine Dore for the Routines and Ruts podcast
A Playlist for the Love Sick: Reading of an excerpt for Chronically Fully Sick podcast
On confusion: Interview with Astrid Edwards and Jamila Rizvi for Anonymous Was a Woman podcast
International Women’s Day event: State Library of Victoria’s Afternoon Tea and Talk series
Writing the Invisible: Podcast of Sydney Writer’s Festival panel
Writing as a disabled person: Interview with Katherine Collette for The First Time podcast

FESTIVAL APPEARANCES:

Show Me Where It Hurts: Interviewed by Jane Howard at Adelaide Writers’ Week
Writing the Invisible: With Fiona Murphy, Jacinta Parsons and Chloe Sargeant at Sydney Writer’s Festival

READING LISTS:

BEST OF’S FOR 2020: Top Picks for Book Clubs from Readings Books, The Most Talked About Books of 2020 from Readings Books, 100 Great Reads from Australian Women in 2020 from Readings Books, Readings’s Summer Reading Guide, Imprints’s Summer Reading Guide, Gleebooks’s Summer Reading Guide, Jo Case from Imprints Booksellers Top Five Books of 2020

MISCELLANEOUS:

The idea of 'too much information' is bad for our health. It's time we ditched it: Opinion for Guardian Australia
Why Does Medicine Care So Little About Women’s Bodies?: The Guardian
Diary of a Bookseller – Spotlight on South Australian authors: InDaily
I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Not Okay: Extract in Primer
How Memoir Writers are Reframing Illness: Kill Your Darlings

Events:

Sick Lit: Endometriosis Literary Series
Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care (CIRAC), University of Graz – Austria
Monday 15 January 2024, 8:30pm ADL time
PAST: In conversation with Jo Case
Hosted by Imprints Booksellers
Thursday 10 September 2020, 6:30pm ADL time
Read Sonia Nair's tweets from the event
PAST: Guardian Australia Book Club: Women vs the Medical System with Katerina Bryant
Hosted by Gabrielle Jackson
Thursday 17 September 2020, 12:30pm ADL time
Watch a condensed version of the event or read Sonia Nair’s tweets from the event
PAST: Invisible and Unseen: In conversation with Jacinta Parsons and Sam Twyford-Moore
Hosted by Harry Hartog, ANU
Wednesday 30 September 2020, 6pm ADL time
$6.36, via Zoom
PAST: In-Conversation with Kylie Maslen
Hosted by Central Coast Libraries
Friday 6 November 2020, 12pm ADL time
Free, registrations required for Zoom link
PAST: Making Memoir Memorable
Workshop for Writers SA
Tuesday 17 November 2020, 7pm ADL time
$35-$50, via Writers SA
PAST: Y Connect: Celebrating the voices of women with disabilities
Hosted by YWCA South Australia
Thursday 26 November 2020, 5:30–7:30pm ADL time
Bookings and information
PAST: Show Me Where It Hurts: In conversation with Jane Howard
Adelaide Writers’ Week
Thursday 4 March 2021, 12pm ADL time
East Stage, free
PAST: Writing the Invisible
Sydney Writer’s Festival
Sunday 2 May 2021, 10am SYD time
SOLD OUT
Closing Event: Pain, Trauma and Hope
Context Writer’s Festival
Sunday 24 September 2023, 3:15pm ACST

Playlist:

The second chapter of the book – A Playlist for the Love Sick – is intended to be read while listening to the songs named as section titles. Here they are together as a playlist below.