Towards True Sick Lit: How to Write a Productive YA Novel about Emetophobia

Writer and emetophobia sufferer George Purves offers creative techniques to produce realistic and transformative depictions of the condition.

Abstract

Emetophobia is a condition that affects a significant percentage of the world’s population, and yet it has been largely overlooked by medical professionals and poorly represented in children’s literature. While vomit is frequently used for gross-out humour in books for young readers, authentic representation of the emetophobic experience remains woefully scarce. Drawing on Raina Telgemeier’s Guts, Tuppence Middleton’s Scorpions, and John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down, I examine how lived experience, extended metaphor, narrative playfulness and embedded bibliotherapeutic practices can be harnessed to produce realistic and transformative depictions of emetophobia for sufferers and non-sufferers alike. Applying Levy’s evidence-based bibliotherapeutic framework, I argue that productive Sick-Lit can lace narratives with therapeutic potential while avoiding romanticised or stereotypical portrayals of illness so commonly featured in the controversial subgenre. By analysing these texts alongside extracts from my own creative practice, I propose a framework for a YA emetophobia narrative that is authentic, hopeful, and marketable beyond its immediate community of sufferers.