Please Read This Leaflet Carfeully

by Karen Havelin

Karen Havelin's Please Read This Leaflet Carefully is a life told in reverse and a subversion of what we expect from stories of illness. Having been diagnosed with endometriosis in her twenties, we follow Laura Fjellstad in her struggle to live a normal life across New York, Paris and Oslo, fueled by her belief that to survive her chronic illness she must be completely self-reliant. Flowing backwards from 2016 to 1995, we meet Laura's younger her healthier selves. Laura as a daughter, a figure skater, a lover, and a mother-finally leading a life her own teenage self would be in awe of. To be devoured intensely in one sitting, Please Read This Leaflet Carefully is a remarkable debut novel with bracing emotional insights and piercing descriptions of pain that linger in one's mind long after the last page. It is also a beguiling meditation on relationships, motherhood, sexuality, pain and the limitations of our own bodies.

197 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 30, 2019

About the author

Karen Havelin is a writer and translator from Bergen, Norway. She attended Skrivekunst-akademiet i Hordaland, and has a Bachelor's degree in French, Literature, and Gender Studies from the University of Bergen and University of Paris Sorbonne. She completed her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University in May 2013. Her work has been published both in Norwegian and in English.

Reviews

[Lynsey Searle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book and it's honest depictions of living in a body that experiences pain daily