Longreads has published an interview with Michele Lent Hirsch conducted and introduced by First-Year Writing faculty (and MFA near-graduate) Jessica Gross. Hirsch has a new book, Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine, that provides the occasion for the interview. Jessica writes, in her introduction:

Hirsch and I are friends—we get together every few months to talk about writing and our lives (she’s a poet, too)—and yet I didn’t know the depth of her experience until I read her thoughtful, complicated, and beautifully written book. I think that’s part of her point: to bring these under-discussed experiences into the light. We met at a restaurant in the West Village and spoke about how chronic illness throws issues of being young and female into sharper relief, how illness intersects with not only gender and age but also sexuality and race, and how, in the midst of these deeply challenging experiences, there is a basic need for empathy.

Go read the rest…