The Revelations of Beauty and Suffering in Crafting Evocative Prose: Contemplations of Broyard’s “Intoxicated by my Illness”

This article presents an autoethnography on crafting beautiful prose. It explores the creative process of writing through an embodied account of learning art, succumbing to injury and reading aesthetic accounts of illness. Drawing parallels between the power of suffering and beauty, it highlights the tension between the technical and the poetic in art-making and aesthetic forms of academic writing. It reflects on Anatole Broyard’s “Intoxicated by my Illness,” to consider how a sense of “style” conveys a vitality of meaning that enables academic writers to move beyond representation towards resonance, revelation and human flourishing.