the pit and the poet

Vita Woods spends a lot of time in bed, in the basement apartment she shares with her boyfriend Max and her goldfish Whitney Houston. For the past few months, Vita has spent her time fighting a chronic illness that no doctor can diagnose. When they run tests on her, they can see abnormalities in her blood tests, but there are not enough markers to give her an exact diagnosis, or any kind of cure. She spends her days falling into The Pit, the place where first the pain and then the darkness envelops her.

The illness started mysteriously soon after she moved in with Max, who is also a doctor not completely able to diagnose Vita. He spends a lot of his time a the hospital, but she can sometimes hear him talking on the phone. Sometimes he talks about her, and she thinks he’s not completely certain her illness is physical. Maybe it’s just mental, is the implication. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with her. Vita knows that the pain is real, and the exhaustion that hits her in The Pit, but she can’t put a name to her illness either.

Her sister Gracie is not a fan of Max. She thinks that Vita is settling for him, making her life smaller to fit his, and tamping down her spirit of creativity and adventure. They survived many years with a tyrannical stepmother, and that bonded them in wonderful ways. But Vita hasn’t connected with her sister much since she moved in with Max, since she fell ill, and she regrets that.

With Max gone so much, Vita enjoys the quiet companionship of Whitney Houston, and one day she wakes up to the presence of someone new in her room. Luigi da Porto is a sixteenth century Italian warrior-poet who Vita first saw in a painting when she lived in Verona. Luigi was injured in battle and lost the love of his life, but he also claimed to have written Romeo and Juliet before William Shakespeare came across the story.

Luigi isn’t there all the time. He comes and goes, popping up from time to time to help Vita or raid her kitchen for snacks. They talk about life and love and Twiglets. He reminds Vita of what she was like in Verona, full of life and creativity. She tells him about her job now, producing a podcast where celebrities talk about secrets from their past. Luigi is not impressed with the podcast, but he’s very impressed with the music coming from the upstairs apartment. Vita hasn’t met her upstairs neighbors, but she heard that she was a piano teacher and she wasn’t entirely well herself..

Not long after that, Vita is laying in bed when the ceiling starts to drip on her. There is a leak in the apartment above hers. She texts Max at work, but she never hears back. Vita puts Whitney’s bowl where the leak is, to catch the drops so they don’t soak the sheets. But she knows she will have to go upstairs to tell the piano teacher about the leak. Vita makes it upstairs before the tingling in her fingers told her that she was headed for The Pit, and the darkness started to close in on her. That’s where Jesse found her.

Jesse is a young man who lives with Mr. Rothwell. He’s an old family friend, and he moved in with her to help take care of her. He’s a musician too, and he goes to fix the leak while Vita talks to Mrs. Rothwell. They get acquainted over tea, and Vita finds that Mrs. Rothwell is a compassionate listener about her mystery illness, asking questions with curiosity, not judgement or doubt. After the visit, Vita finds that talking to Mrs. Rothwell lifted her spirits, and she makes the journey upstairs when she can.

As the weeks go by, with Vita in and out of The Pit, she finds herself thinking back through her life. She thinks about Gracie, and about Luigi, and about Max, and about Whitney Houston. She builds a friendship with Mrs. Rothwell and Jesse. And she starts to realize what it is she really wants from the rest of her life. If she stays sick or gets better, she wants to be happy. And only she can decide what that will look like.

There’s Nothing Wrong with Her is a deep dive into the resilience of the human spirit. It’s about dealing with chronic illness and the toll it can take on a person and on relationships. It’s about the frustration of how little medicine can tell us about what’s going inside our bodies and minds and the self-doubt that creates. It’s about loss and grief and hope, about ow the past is with us still and the future is there to be created. It’s about everything that makes us human and connects us at our core.

This is a book that I struggled to describe but I felt in the marrow of my bones. It is about the human experience, from the pain to the anger to the ghosts to the hope. It’s about creating stories of our lives, building meaning and learning to forgive. It’s about making mistakes and staring over. Vita is so courageous in her struggles with The Pit. She is generous and smart and imperfect and fascinating. This is not an easy book to read, as there are lots of painful emotions in The Pit and outside of it, but it is genuine and compassionate and resonant with the pains we have all felt in our lives. It’s not for everyone, but if you are one of the few who will pick this book and give it a try, you will find that you are one of the lucky ones indeed.

Egalleys of There’s Nothing Wrong with Her were provided by G.P. Putnam’s Sons through NetGalley, with many thanks.