I can, if you are hurting, keep you company.
Perhaps, however, the purpose of literature is not social, or therapeutic. That may be, in which case, I suppose we should house these memoirs, my own included, on the self-help shelf. But that seems a little too easy. The illness memoir, after all, is not a prescription but a description, offered not to cure but to accompany.
Lauren Slater in Life is short, art is shorter (David Shields, Elizabeth Cooperman)