Author Chat: Kathy Page on "In This Faulty Machine"
In This Faulty Machine: A Memoir of Loss and Transformation by Kathy Page
Toronto: Viking Canada, 2025
I’ve recently reviewed Salt Spring Island author Kathy Page’s new memoir In This Faulty Machine: A Memoir of Loss and Transformation for the British Columbia Review, a book that recalls her experiences being diagnosed and living with Parkinson’s Disease over the last five years. You can check out my review here.
From the blurb:
“In This Faulty Machine is an eye-opening, often lyrical and very funny report from that "other kingdom" of illness, from an observant, wise, and honest involuntary resident. The author's acute yet welcoming voice draws us into the erratic, intimate, and troubling effects of the disease and its impact on her relationships alongside the pleasures of family, friends, reading, writing, and the natural world.
This one-of-a-kind memoir offers a thoughtful exploration of the complex and evolving science of this debilitating disease, a gripping account of the various ways that it impacts both PWP (People with Parkinson's) and their families. The book is also a unique look into the creative process of a life-long novelist who finds that she can no longer create in the way she has for decades.”
Kathy is an award-winning writer who was born in the UK but has lived in Canada since 2001. She’s the author of eight novels, the most recent of which, Dear Evelyn (2018) won the 2018 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her two short story collections, Paradise & Elsewhere (2014) and The Two of Us (2016) were nominated for the Giller Prize. Her new book In This Faulty Machine was published in September 2025, and is her first foray into full-length memoir.
Spoiler alert for my review, but I enjoyed In this Faulty Machine very much. It spoke to me on many levels, and I came away from reading it with a different perspective on Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and the nature of illness in general, both on a personal level and a universal one. I’m so pleased to feature my latest Author Chat with Kathy Page on my blog to talk about the book, her experiences, and her writing process.
Toronto: Viking Canada, 2025
I’ve recently reviewed Salt Spring Island author Kathy Page’s new memoir In This Faulty Machine: A Memoir of Loss and Transformation for the British Columbia Review, a book that recalls her experiences being diagnosed and living with Parkinson’s Disease over the last five years. You can check out my review here.
From the blurb:
“In This Faulty Machine is an eye-opening, often lyrical and very funny report from that "other kingdom" of illness, from an observant, wise, and honest involuntary resident. The author's acute yet welcoming voice draws us into the erratic, intimate, and troubling effects of the disease and its impact on her relationships alongside the pleasures of family, friends, reading, writing, and the natural world.
This one-of-a-kind memoir offers a thoughtful exploration of the complex and evolving science of this debilitating disease, a gripping account of the various ways that it impacts both PWP (People with Parkinson's) and their families. The book is also a unique look into the creative process of a life-long novelist who finds that she can no longer create in the way she has for decades.”
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| Author Kathy Page (photo: Brett Josef Grubisic) |
Spoiler alert for my review, but I enjoyed In this Faulty Machine very much. It spoke to me on many levels, and I came away from reading it with a different perspective on Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and the nature of illness in general, both on a personal level and a universal one. I’m so pleased to feature my latest Author Chat with Kathy Page on my blog to talk about the book, her experiences, and her writing process.
***
Kathy: My pleasure, Trish. Yes, that first chapter has a huge amount of work to do. I needed to introduce the voice and way the story would be told, the characters as well as the nature and scope of the story. I had to set the stage for what is to come without resorting to what my students and I used to label an “info dump.” So, the disease is effectively the antagonist and must somehow announce itself, or be discovered early on.
As it happened, that fall, catastrophic as it was for someone used to feeling strong and healthy, had nothing to do with the eventual diagnosis of Parkinson’s. But it did mark a border between the healthy past and what was to come. It was the beginning of my rather abrupt transition into someone living in a “faulty machine.” So was the myocarditis (inflammation of the heart, also nothing to do with Parkinson’s) that followed it later in the same year…Parkinson’s is sneaky and secretive, and every person has a somewhat different version of it. For me, its first rather ordinary symptoms probably occurred a decade or more before what seemed like the beginning, in a stretch of time that neurologists call the prodrome. On their own these early signs would not be enough to solidify into a definite prediction. And it wouldn’t have helped to know.
Parkinson’s, when it did emerge, appeared as tremor in my left arm and hand.
Getting from that tremor to the diagnosis was not simple, and it was complicated by the ongoing shortage of specialists, the pandemic, and the fact that I had an atypical presentation: not just one or two symptoms but a sampler of them appearing one after the other over a few months.
Trish: You really do capture the sense of that long process to diagnosis and your emotions surrounding it in the first part of the memoir. In the book you use language and ideas so effectively to help the reader understand more closely the experience of PD symptoms. “I feel as if I am moving through water. As if I’m trying to drive a faulty machine. As if a spell has been cast over me.” You also write about the use of metaphor to understand illness and disease. It seems almost necessary to bridge the divide between the “well” person and the “unwell” person in terms of understanding, but they’re also troubling, particularly the notion of illness as a “journey.” When is metaphor annoyingly inappropriate, and when is it useful in your writing?
Kathy: It’s not only professional wordsmiths who reach for metaphor. Most people trying to convey an experience that's not shared, but quite personal or interior or new to them, or in some way remarkable, hit a point where they find plain language is not enough. You want the other person to see — vision is often used to mean to accurately understand — what you are describing, to come closer to doing that than plainer words can achieve.
By metaphor I don’t only mean metaphors in strictly rhetorical terms, but the metaphorical way of thinking, the use of comparison, simile and so on. We dip into a bank of shared experiences and meanings to find a correlative, something else that in some way aptly describes at least some of the qualities of what we are trying to convey. One way or another you say what something is like. Success is variable, but some metaphors are startlingly apt and do a great job at bringing what is spoken of to life, allowing the reader to fully engage.
The danger is that those startlingly effective comparisons become over-used and under examined. By dint of repetition and automatic use they come quickly to mind and prevent us from finding our own which may be even more apt. We slide along the surface of the words and end up feeling and thinking less deeply. We don’t pause to evaluate them. We may not notice the ways in which the metaphor is inaccurate and that can accidentally create serious real-life consequences. It’s also something that can be used cynically and manipulatively in propaganda or advertising. But, assuming good intentions here, I think there is always a place where some aspect of the experience does not match the comparison being made. I think that’s a good thing. Seeming imperfections can lead us to adjust and re-examine metaphors even as we feel their aptness and impact. To appreciate but remain alert — perhaps try again, or add something, develop the image, as has occurred over time with that image of the kingdom of the sick that drew me in.
Trish: I like that a lot: “to appreciate but remain alert.” Indeed, in the first pages of your book you noted the idea of the “passport” to the kingdom of the sick, referencing writing in Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. How has reading others’ books and essays on illness been helpful for you?
Kathy: Reading other writers on sickness has been a consolation and an inspiration. It’s been vital.
I’m not mentioning any specific examples here, but many of my favourites are included in the further reading suggestions at the end of ITFM.
I find it enormously moving to meet on the page someone else, another writer, who has struggled to adapt to some kind of dramatic change to their physical and mental functioning, and to their sense of who they were and who they now seem to be. To see how they, too, tried to negotiate a new way of being in the world. To take in that despite their difficulties, these writers made the effort to explore, articulate and express what they made of their experience so that it could be shared with others (sick or healthy). They used their remaining skills–or found new ones–to create something that could break the spell of isolation. It seems to me a very generous thing to do.
Narratives of illness may be highly specific but are also very inclusive, open to any reader aware of their essential human vulnerability. They offer recognition and create connection and community around shared experience and understanding. By the end of the book the reader feels connected not just to the author, but also to others who have read–and will read–the book.
This can happen with writing in any genre, but it seems more of an integral part of the autobiographical account of illness. As I say in Faulty Machine, this kind of writing and reading feels to me like a very particular kind of love.
Trish: In that vein, I’m curious about how this book came about? Did you start by writing more for yourself or for others? Did this change as you progressed through the book?
Kathy: I started off just keeping very basic kinds of notes about symptoms, activities I could or could not do, various thoughts. It was a sort of assertion, an anchor. I found it useful because it put me somewhat in the position of an observer. I could take that little bit of distance and use it to free myself somewhat from my predicament: definitely a very helpful thing. As I eventually managed to get to diagnosis and treatment, my capacities improved and gradually I started to write more and begin to think about what I might do with it. My ambitions grew over the years I worked on the book. The work was quite painstaking because of my hands’ loss of function but I became very persistent. Could I make it into something readable by others? Could I make something both emotionally and aesthetically satisfying?
Trish: When reading, I could feel that the book was in one sense specific to your own experience being diagnosed with PD. It’s a very personal memoir. But for me, it also spoke to the human condition and the fact that most of us will face illness and disability at some point, so I think you succeeded.
Kathy: I’m very glad to hear that, thank you.
Trish: You mentioned the challenges in your ability to write since your diagnosis. How has your writing life and routine changed in the last few years?
Kathy: Along with the physical issues I have had with using my hands to write and the frustration and disappointment experienced with dictation software, both of which I have at least found ways around (though they make me very slow), I just knew that I couldn’t write fiction. Also, that I didn’t want to. Could not and would not. In the book, I explain in detail about the way Parkinson’s affects brain function and cognition, especially conceiving of and planning large scale projects, such as writing a novel or even a single short story— or a collection of such. That’s the “could not.” The other side of this was that I felt a real drive to communicate about this new world/planet/ reality I inhabited. To describe, to explain, to find a way, because it wasn’t easy to show others, or to enable them to understand, to gain at least some sense of this new reality of mine. How it was on a physical, emotional, relational, intellectual, and dare I say spiritual level? On all sorts of levels. I did this for the people in my family, so we could understand each other better, but also for a broader – as broad as possible – audience so that they could increase their understanding of people in my situation and others similar. In contrast to inventing some other predicament for a story, this felt important and urgent. And it was not easy, so would need all the attention I had for writing.
As an aside, I still read fiction and enjoy it sometimes. My criteria have changed quite a lot. I used to be very open to the unreal surreal fantastical as well as realistic storylines. I still am, but my standard is rather tough now. The writer really has to make me believe every single moment of it, make it seem real. Before I was more prepared to be playful and enter into “the willing suspension of disbelief.”
Trish: I liked that the book presented each chapter as an essay on a particular topic, but overall took a fairly linear approach to the timeline. It is a “memoir in essays.” I loved the chapters on how curiosity can be a blessing or a curse; on the exercise prescription for PD; and the chapter where you visit your mother’s approach to wellness. Was there a chapter that you found most interesting to write, or felt most compelling?
Kathy: I did both enjoy and nearly lose my mind writing “A Curious Tale”! Some readers may feel the latter, too. It’s quite oblique and literary.
Trish: I liked that chapter too, in which you explore the wonder of curiosity, but also its sometimes-unanticipated dark side.
The subtitle of your book is “a memoir of loss and transformation.” Near the end of the book you write, “Groping my way toward and understanding that accepting I am fighting a losing battle, yet doing so with some kind of grace and style, could be a form of liberation, a victory of sorts, or at the very least more fun and more interesting than trying to ignore what is happening.” As the book is now finished and going out into the world for others to read, how has its writing aided your own process of transformation?
Kathy: It is quite new, so it’s hard to fully answer that. The response so far has been hugely positive, and I find that very rewarding and enjoyable, because this was difficult to do and took a long time. Now, I’m facing interesting challenges like how to honestly respond when I’m asked questions that I don’t feel it is my role to answer. I need to emphasise what the book is and is not: a memoir about my personal experience and the ways I am thinking about it, but not, of course, medical or spiritual advice. It’s not a how-to manual of any kind.
Also, despite the unusual speed with which this book went through the publishing process, the version of me that readers come to know on the page and then may expect to meet in person at a reading is one I’ve already left behind. Perhaps this is always the case with memoir? But for me it’s a powerful reminder of living with an accelerated rate of change. I’ve found it somewhat chilling but also oddly exciting to be confronted with that!
Trish: It’s an example of the constant push and pull of mixed feelings that you address so well in the book and have been very much a part of your experience.
I’ve enjoyed our conversation enormously! Thank you so much for joining me on the blog, Kathy. I truly hope that In This Faulty Machine is read by many and fosters a sense of connection and understanding. I know it did for me.
Kathy: Many thanks, Trish, and to all who read.
***
Thanks again to author Kathy Page for joining me for my Author Chat series at TrishTalksBooks.com. You can find her online at www.kathypage.info and on Instagram @kathypagebooks. Happy reading!
Getting from that tremor to the diagnosis was not simple, and it was complicated by the ongoing shortage of specialists, the pandemic, and the fact that I had an atypical presentation: not just one or two symptoms but a sampler of them appearing one after the other over a few months.
Trish: You really do capture the sense of that long process to diagnosis and your emotions surrounding it in the first part of the memoir. In the book you use language and ideas so effectively to help the reader understand more closely the experience of PD symptoms. “I feel as if I am moving through water. As if I’m trying to drive a faulty machine. As if a spell has been cast over me.” You also write about the use of metaphor to understand illness and disease. It seems almost necessary to bridge the divide between the “well” person and the “unwell” person in terms of understanding, but they’re also troubling, particularly the notion of illness as a “journey.” When is metaphor annoyingly inappropriate, and when is it useful in your writing?
Kathy: It’s not only professional wordsmiths who reach for metaphor. Most people trying to convey an experience that's not shared, but quite personal or interior or new to them, or in some way remarkable, hit a point where they find plain language is not enough. You want the other person to see — vision is often used to mean to accurately understand — what you are describing, to come closer to doing that than plainer words can achieve.
By metaphor I don’t only mean metaphors in strictly rhetorical terms, but the metaphorical way of thinking, the use of comparison, simile and so on. We dip into a bank of shared experiences and meanings to find a correlative, something else that in some way aptly describes at least some of the qualities of what we are trying to convey. One way or another you say what something is like. Success is variable, but some metaphors are startlingly apt and do a great job at bringing what is spoken of to life, allowing the reader to fully engage.
The danger is that those startlingly effective comparisons become over-used and under examined. By dint of repetition and automatic use they come quickly to mind and prevent us from finding our own which may be even more apt. We slide along the surface of the words and end up feeling and thinking less deeply. We don’t pause to evaluate them. We may not notice the ways in which the metaphor is inaccurate and that can accidentally create serious real-life consequences. It’s also something that can be used cynically and manipulatively in propaganda or advertising. But, assuming good intentions here, I think there is always a place where some aspect of the experience does not match the comparison being made. I think that’s a good thing. Seeming imperfections can lead us to adjust and re-examine metaphors even as we feel their aptness and impact. To appreciate but remain alert — perhaps try again, or add something, develop the image, as has occurred over time with that image of the kingdom of the sick that drew me in.
Trish: I like that a lot: “to appreciate but remain alert.” Indeed, in the first pages of your book you noted the idea of the “passport” to the kingdom of the sick, referencing writing in Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. How has reading others’ books and essays on illness been helpful for you?
Kathy: Reading other writers on sickness has been a consolation and an inspiration. It’s been vital.
I’m not mentioning any specific examples here, but many of my favourites are included in the further reading suggestions at the end of ITFM.
I find it enormously moving to meet on the page someone else, another writer, who has struggled to adapt to some kind of dramatic change to their physical and mental functioning, and to their sense of who they were and who they now seem to be. To see how they, too, tried to negotiate a new way of being in the world. To take in that despite their difficulties, these writers made the effort to explore, articulate and express what they made of their experience so that it could be shared with others (sick or healthy). They used their remaining skills–or found new ones–to create something that could break the spell of isolation. It seems to me a very generous thing to do.
Narratives of illness may be highly specific but are also very inclusive, open to any reader aware of their essential human vulnerability. They offer recognition and create connection and community around shared experience and understanding. By the end of the book the reader feels connected not just to the author, but also to others who have read–and will read–the book.
This can happen with writing in any genre, but it seems more of an integral part of the autobiographical account of illness. As I say in Faulty Machine, this kind of writing and reading feels to me like a very particular kind of love.
Trish: In that vein, I’m curious about how this book came about? Did you start by writing more for yourself or for others? Did this change as you progressed through the book?
 |
| Kathy Page at her recent book launch (photo: Salt Spring Public Library) |
Kathy: I started off just keeping very basic kinds of notes about symptoms, activities I could or could not do, various thoughts. It was a sort of assertion, an anchor. I found it useful because it put me somewhat in the position of an observer. I could take that little bit of distance and use it to free myself somewhat from my predicament: definitely a very helpful thing. As I eventually managed to get to diagnosis and treatment, my capacities improved and gradually I started to write more and begin to think about what I might do with it. My ambitions grew over the years I worked on the book. The work was quite painstaking because of my hands’ loss of function but I became very persistent. Could I make it into something readable by others? Could I make something both emotionally and aesthetically satisfying?
Trish: When reading, I could feel that the book was in one sense specific to your own experience being diagnosed with PD. It’s a very personal memoir. But for me, it also spoke to the human condition and the fact that most of us will face illness and disability at some point, so I think you succeeded.
Kathy: I’m very glad to hear that, thank you.
Trish: You mentioned the challenges in your ability to write since your diagnosis. How has your writing life and routine changed in the last few years?
Kathy: Along with the physical issues I have had with using my hands to write and the frustration and disappointment experienced with dictation software, both of which I have at least found ways around (though they make me very slow), I just knew that I couldn’t write fiction. Also, that I didn’t want to. Could not and would not. In the book, I explain in detail about the way Parkinson’s affects brain function and cognition, especially conceiving of and planning large scale projects, such as writing a novel or even a single short story— or a collection of such. That’s the “could not.” The other side of this was that I felt a real drive to communicate about this new world/planet/ reality I inhabited. To describe, to explain, to find a way, because it wasn’t easy to show others, or to enable them to understand, to gain at least some sense of this new reality of mine. How it was on a physical, emotional, relational, intellectual, and dare I say spiritual level? On all sorts of levels. I did this for the people in my family, so we could understand each other better, but also for a broader – as broad as possible – audience so that they could increase their understanding of people in my situation and others similar. In contrast to inventing some other predicament for a story, this felt important and urgent. And it was not easy, so would need all the attention I had for writing.
As an aside, I still read fiction and enjoy it sometimes. My criteria have changed quite a lot. I used to be very open to the unreal surreal fantastical as well as realistic storylines. I still am, but my standard is rather tough now. The writer really has to make me believe every single moment of it, make it seem real. Before I was more prepared to be playful and enter into “the willing suspension of disbelief.”
Trish: I liked that the book presented each chapter as an essay on a particular topic, but overall took a fairly linear approach to the timeline. It is a “memoir in essays.” I loved the chapters on how curiosity can be a blessing or a curse; on the exercise prescription for PD; and the chapter where you visit your mother’s approach to wellness. Was there a chapter that you found most interesting to write, or felt most compelling?
Kathy: I did both enjoy and nearly lose my mind writing “A Curious Tale”! Some readers may feel the latter, too. It’s quite oblique and literary.
Trish: I liked that chapter too, in which you explore the wonder of curiosity, but also its sometimes-unanticipated dark side.
The subtitle of your book is “a memoir of loss and transformation.” Near the end of the book you write, “Groping my way toward and understanding that accepting I am fighting a losing battle, yet doing so with some kind of grace and style, could be a form of liberation, a victory of sorts, or at the very least more fun and more interesting than trying to ignore what is happening.” As the book is now finished and going out into the world for others to read, how has its writing aided your own process of transformation?
.jpg) |
| Author Kathy Page (photo: Billie Woods) |
Also, despite the unusual speed with which this book went through the publishing process, the version of me that readers come to know on the page and then may expect to meet in person at a reading is one I’ve already left behind. Perhaps this is always the case with memoir? But for me it’s a powerful reminder of living with an accelerated rate of change. I’ve found it somewhat chilling but also oddly exciting to be confronted with that!
Trish: It’s an example of the constant push and pull of mixed feelings that you address so well in the book and have been very much a part of your experience.
I’ve enjoyed our conversation enormously! Thank you so much for joining me on the blog, Kathy. I truly hope that In This Faulty Machine is read by many and fosters a sense of connection and understanding. I know it did for me.
Kathy: Many thanks, Trish, and to all who read.
***
Thanks again to author Kathy Page for joining me for my Author Chat series at TrishTalksBooks.com. You can find her online at www.kathypage.info and on Instagram @kathypagebooks. Happy reading!
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