Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.33
https://orcid.org/0009-0006-6358-1801Ali Hazelwood is a contemporary author of feminist STEM and paranormal romances. Her 2025 paranormal romance novel Mate follows Serena, who grew up believing she was an orphan human and recently discovered she is a werewolf-human hybrid. This paper offers a close reading of the medical subplot in Mate through a medical-humanities. Serena Paris, a hybrid were-human, is misdiagnosed with a “were disorder,” given a terminal prognosis, and finally understood only when a midwife recognizes her symptoms as a heat cycle. The paper treats the novel’s paranormal setting as an estranged context where the experience of illness under diagnostic uncertainty and the systemic limitations of biomedicine can be examined. Using frameworks from narrative medicine, medical anthropology, and narratology, it analyzes themes such as interactions with the healthcare system, the divergent temporalities of doctors and patients, uncertainty as clinical anathema, the problem patient, and medical pluralism. For each theme, it attends to the literary devices through which Hazelwood renders the experience, including ellipsis, iterative narration, repetition, register shifts, and the staging of recognition and reversal. The paper argues that Mate represents illness as a problem of recognition, spanning time, embodiment, diagnostic language, and epistemic authority. It further shows how medical pluralism makes Serena’s suffering interpretable. It concludes that speculative fiction is a productive site for examining experiences of diagnostic ambiguity and idiopathic illnesses.
Narula, Kritika. “Fact in Fiction: Diagnostic Uncertainty and Healthcare in Ali Hazelwood’s Mate.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 593-615, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.33.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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