Hell Days

When I think of my hell days, I think of crime scenes. Familiar sites, made uncanny with violence.

In the fluorescent tedium of a call centre in 2018, acclaimed novelist Laura Elizabeth Woollett finds herself meticulously plotting her own death. Until her period arrives, and equilibrium with it. After years of dismissing these monthly turns, she's diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). Then, at 33, she falls pregnant and experiences a reprieve - but will it last?

Through case studies, interviews, extensive medical research, and forays into history, true crime, and algorithmic rabbit-holes, Woollett looks beyond herself to assemble a chorus of PMDD sufferers, along with dedicated scientists and clinicians. Navigating the impossible terrain between a potentially fatal disorder and treatments that can be almost as dangerous, Hell Days is a testament to the precarity and dignity of life as a periodically suicidal person in an often-brutal world.

'She had me at luteal ... Intelligent, canny, wildly curious, and oddly comforting, Hell Days makes sense of the too-often medically insensible. If what gets measured gets managed, let's hope that what gets transcribed gets treated.'
-Clare Wright, author of The Bark Petitions

'Lyrical, quietly compelling, and distinctive ... An essential contribution to a long-overdue conversation about women's health.'
-Books+Publishing

'A deeply affecting and immersive dive into an underworld that shapes and distorts so many of our lives. Hell Days is at once journalistically rigorous and lyrically reflexive, never relying on the easy conclusion. Woollett holds the door open for a complex, and often conflicting look at her subject, and the result is a work of great empathy, elegance and piercing intellect.'
-Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug