Profile – Emily Troscianko (b. 1982)

Emily is Sue’s daughter, and has many (mostly fond) childhood memories of Sue’s strange explorations of the paranormal, alien abductions, and memes, as well as of morning meditation sessions together before school. Emily studied French and German as an undergraduate at Oxford, and stayed there to do a doctorate on the works of Franz Kafka. Asking the question ‘Why is Kafka’s writing so powerful?’ led her to investigate theories of vision, imagination, and emotion, and to conduct her own experiments on how readers respond to different kinds of fictional texts. Having suffered from anorexia from age 16 to 26, she later began to connect her interest in mental health with her understanding of literary reading, starting to explore how fiction-reading might have effects on mental illness, and vice versa. Her current work is a mixture of cognitive–literary and medical–humanities research and various kinds of writing for audiences beyond academia. Like Sue, she seems to have had to give up having a job to write this book. When not writing, she can often be found driving her cow-spotted campervan around Britain, captaining her narrowboat along the Thames, or lifting heavy things (sometimes with Sue) in a powerlifting gym.