Emily Troscianko

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 text. 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 research hovers between cognitive literary science and the health humanities. Just like for Sue, this book was one of her main reasons for giving up having a job, and she now has a freelance career as a recovery coach for people with eating disorders and a work/life coach for people in academia. When not writing or coaching, she can often be found captaining her narrowboat Lancer along the Thames, walking in the San Gabriel mountains around Los Angeles, or lifting heavy things (sometimes with Sue) in a powerlifting gym.