When Kjersti A. Skomsvold was seventeen years old and about to start engineering studies at college, she found herself almost unable to move. Laid out like a relic in a nursing home, she listens to an old woman dying, watches her boyfriend drift away, and makes compendious lists of her worries (that she will have to go speed-dating in a wheelchair, that she will be afraid and in pain for the rest of her life). She also begins to compose a novel on Post-it notes that she sticks on the wall above her bed.

Monsterhuman is an autofictional tour de force–a funny, sad, astoundingly energetic novel about suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, the power of writing, and twenty-first-century literary life.