When I sought help for crippling invasive thoughts, I was told I had a disease like any other. But I wasn’t able to recover until I understood the fallacy at the heart of mental healthcare

Six years ago, I sat halfway up a spiral staircase in an old medical library in London, watching an actor recreate one of the most intense moments of my life. We were filming a TV drama based on a memoir I’d written about my struggles with disturbing sexual and violent intrusive thoughts.

The story had started when, aged 15, I was suddenly bombarded by relentless, maddening doubts about core aspects of my identity: my capacity for violence and abuse, my physical appearance, my sexuality, whether I could trust my bones not to break. Graphic, unbearable thoughts and images started looping in my mind, thousands of times a day. I had no language for my devastating anxiety, or for my shame, so I kept it all a secret for 12 years.

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Marina Hyde with her take on Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s surreal US presidential bid (1m23s); Emine Saner meets the sociopath who learned to behave – and found happiness (8m05s); why Gen Z has fallen in love with Sex and the City (24m45s); and do our political opponents really hate us? (29m54s).

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The Russian opposition politician, who died in prison in February, completed an autobiography which will come out later this year

A memoir by the late Russian politician Alexei Navalny is due to be published this autumn, publisher Penguin Random House (PRH) has announced.

The Russian opposition leader and pro-democracy campaigner began writing his book, titled Patriot, shortly after his poisoning in 2020. He completed it before he died in prison in 2024, dictating some parts.

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Memoir, cultural history and bleak humour characterise this brilliant personal exploration of health anxiety

Caroline Crampton was 17 and midway through her A-levels when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a rare form of blood cancer. When the diagnosis was delivered in the consultant’s office, her mother fainted, quietly sliding off her chair and on to the floor. After months of gruelling treatment, Crampton was given the all-clear and went to university as planned. But in her first year, she found a lump on her neck that turned out to be a tumour. Crampton had further chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant, which was followed by weeks in an isolation ward and a period of close monitoring. At 22, she was declared cancer-free, and, five years later, had her last check-up. By then, she was told, she had no more chance of getting cancer than the rest of the population.

What those check-ups didn’t address was the anxiety that had embedded itself in her psyche and has tormented her since her first diagnosis, leading her to visit her doctor with imagined conditions, or simply to stare, panicked, in the mirror while feeling around her skin for nonexistent lumps. “You are allowed to think it. I can hear you thinking it,” Crampton notes at the start of A Body Made of Glass. “I am a hypochondriac. Or, at least, I worry that I am, which really amounts to the same thing.”

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How the author swapped journalism for the freedom, adventure and terror of life on the ocean

Radical changes of direction seem to require a great deal of drama, at least in the recounting: a decisive moment, a flight from unhappiness, a marshalling of immense internal reserves. In truth, they are often more gently underdetermined than that, as is Susan Smillie’s absorbing account of her life at sea in her boat Isean. There were catalysts – the mutation of a long-term romantic relationship into a deep friendship, the sense of fracturing and fractiousness that beset the UK after the referendum in 2016 – but there was also a more gradual realignment of priorities, a slow realisation that there may be a different and more generative way to live.

Maybe it started when Smillie rescued Isean from a boatyard in the west of Scotland, the vessel’s graceful lines blinding her to the thousands of pounds that would be needed for restoration. Before long, pottering up and down the Sussex coast didn’t seem enough, and Smillie set herself the challenge of gaining the knowledge and expertise necessary for longer, more complicated trips. At the same time, as she progressed through her 40s, with a good and long-worked-for job as an editor at the Guardian, she came to appreciate that it’s quite possible to outgrow one’s dreams. A course correction was needed.

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In this fascinating book, a survivor of a life-threatening illness chronicles the history of health anxiety and ponders whether it is a rational response to our flawed bodies

In the 14th century, King Charles VI of France suffered from a curious, but by no means original, delusion. He believed his body was made entirely of glass. A relatively new material, both fragile and transparent, glass captures the hypochondriac’s acutest fear – brittle vulnerability – with their greatest desire: visceral omniscience. This human longing to peer inside our “meaty vessel” was answered in the 20th century by medical technologies, including blood testing, microscopy and imaging, which became widely available. Rather than soothe the hypochondriacal itch, however, this intimate access – along with Google’s democratisation of medical knowledge – has fuelled health anxiety to new heights.

Caroline Crampton describes herself as a hypochondriac, but one with impostor syndrome because she previously had a severe “real” illness. She thinks back to the naivety of her 17-year-old self, unaware of “the tennis ball-sized lump” above her left collarbone that was “already big enough to cast its own shadow”. Life-threatening disease was lurking in plain sight, painfully obvious to see in old photos. More than a decade after radiotherapy, chemo, a stem cell transplant, egg retrieval and a successfully managed recurrence of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Crampton now sees tumours everywhere. The hypochondriacal cancer survivor is, she suggests, tragicomic. A brush with malignancy is supposed to remind you what really matters; instead, Crampton feels trapped in the limbo between the “binaries of sickness and health”, poking at her body in the mirror.

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The Scottish comedian narrates her traumatic experience of being ‘wired differently’ and why autism is so frequently missed in women

When the Scottish comedian Fern Brady phoned her father to say she had been diagnosed with autism, he was on his daily commute back from London. He said, “Oh right”, and began complaining about the traffic. Brady replied: “Well, they say autism can be inherited from one parent, so I guess that’s answered the question of which one.”

Strong Female Character, written and narrated by Brady, and winner of the inaugural Nero award for nonfiction, documents the turmoil of growing up with undiagnosed autism, during which she excelled academically but struggled with sensory overload and had violent outbursts that baffled her family, teachers and peers. After she began self-harming, her parents sent her to an adolescent psychiatric unit where she was a day patient. She was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, though she knew that wasn’t the whole story. It took until she was 34 to get an autism diagnosis.

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If Labour gets into government, the deputy labour leader Angela Rayner will be one of the most powerful women in Britain. ‘Bring it on,’ she says (1m58s); and ‘I was having a much better time as a girl in that parallel life’: why author Lucy Sante transitioned (29m08s)

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This candid memoir by the stylist who helped create the singer’s Ziggy look offers a vivid snapshot of his golden years – but loses its lustre when Bowie moves to LA

This honest and troubled memoir belongs to a genre one may shorthand as I-was-Sinatra’s-valet: how an ordinary day jobber encountered a star and found life glitteringly transformed. Here it’s a 21-year-old hairdresser, Suzi Fussey, living at home with her parents in Bromley, south-east London, and working at a salon in neighbouring (“posher”) Beckenham. One day in 1970 a customer, Mrs Jones, mentions her “artistic” son, David, who plays in a band; the following week, she brings in David’s wife, Angie, who wants a haircut – “something outrageous”. Angie is so delighted with the result that Suzi is summoned to their home to meet David himself, a pale and epicene young man now going under the name of David Bowie . She styles his “mousy” hair into a spiky red feather cut, which he loves, and the look of Ziggy Stardust is born.

Her infatuation with the couple is instant and irrevocable. Their flat at Haddon Hall is for her a Xanadu of chic, of scented candles and foreign magazines and strange sleeping arrangements. It’s also an escape from an unhappy home. She shrinks from the glum suburban routines of her mum and dad and yet – in an almost parenthetical aside – we learn that they too once knew glamour and danger. It was the war: her dad drove tanks in occupied France (and won medals); mum drove pilots to their planes at Biggin Hill airport. Scratch the surface and lives poignantly begin to look less ordinary.

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