The book opens after a visit to the doctor and ends, a year later, with a question about medications. In between, Ginzburg offers a portrait of hypochondria as a manifestation of status anxiety. She writes short and spare, like Chekhov, while sounding out how thoughts take bodily shapes. “I told you everything that came into my head. Not any more, now. Now I have lost the wish to tell you things. What I think about now, I tell a little of it to myself, and then I bury it, I send it underground. Then, little by little, I shall not tell things any more even to myself, I shall drive everything underground at once, every random thought, before it can take shape.”