What is illness? Is it a physiological malfunction or a social label? Is it simply the absence of health? How do our physical, social, and emotional worlds change when we become ill? Havi Carel addresses these questions by interweaving a personal account of her own serious illness with a more abstract, philosophical account of illness in general. She argues that illness should be seen not simply as a localized biological dysfunction but as a transformation of our social, psychological, and physical worlds and our temporal existence. By focusing on illness as a lived experience, she reveals illness as a life-changing event rather than a limited physiological problem, showing that the body is not a lifeless container for the self but the core of human subjectivity and embodied existence.