'In her 2019 memoir Imperfect, Lee Kofman wrote about the disfiguring scars she sustained as a child, the result of several major surgeries. She describes going to great lengths to conceal these scars as an adult, with her ‘shell of stockings and long dresses’. It is this impulse towards concealment and secrecy that first led me to feel a great (and covert) sense of kinship with Kofman. In my case, it was my own mental illness, and its strange physical manifestations, that I was driven to hide.'(Introduction)