In Australian writer Katherine Brabon's new novel, Body Friend, the protagonist meets two different young women — Frida and Sylvia.

Not only do they look just like her, but they also move like her. It turns out, all three women are living with a chronic illness and are in pain.

But when it comes to dealing with their illnesses and pain, Frida and Sylvia seem to be polar opposites. Frida is devoted to swimming and resolutely believes that hard, physical work is the key to recovery. Sylvia is equally convinced that rest is most important for a chronically ill body in pain.

Our unnamed protagonist is caught in the middle. Through the novel, we watch her try to find the best way to manage her body, her mind and the effects of her illness on who she is.

Brabon is the Melbourne author of The Memory Artist and The Shut Ins. And while she's lived with chronic pain since her early 20s, Body Friend is the first time she's explored the topic in fiction.

"I'd seen fiction convey chronic illness in that it's tangential to the plot," said Brabon on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "So it's there, but it's not the main character, it's not the main momentum in the book. Whereas with this, I wanted the body to be the whole point, the whole plot in a sense."

"I wanted the plot to actually just almost mimic the body in the sense of this repetitive cyclical illness."

On Bookends, Brabon joined Mattea Roach to discuss living with and writing about chronic pain.

Katherine Brabon: As somebody with a chronic illness, sometimes you wake up feeling literally like a different person day-to-day and I was interested in how that can really impact how you feel and how you will approach your illness. I wanted to convey that changeability that you can feel when you're going through these states of illness. It's particularly cyclical.

What better way to dramatize these feelings than to personify them as these two women. But on another level as well, I feel that there's so much tension or fraught mental gymnastics that happen around the concept of rest and the push to activity that we feel not only in the chronic illness community, but I just think in general in wellness spheres. Particularly, with the presence of social media and feeling like we need to do and be certain things. With chronic illness, you can feel so guilty about resting, but it is so important. But then, in some ways, we almost commodify rest or make a thing on our To Do List.

So I wanted to convey that tension that you feel knowing that your body will feel better if you rest a little, which is what Sylvia really advocates, but also finding it difficult to rest because when you're on some level always unwell. You're wondering: when does it get bad enough that I deserve rest because if I'm always in a state of pain, when do I know to rest?

I wanted to sort of blur those questions, though neither Frida or Sylvia's approach, I hope, seem to be the way to approach illness.

KB: When I was approaching this novel, I did a little bit of reading. I was interested to know how other artists and writers had approached the body in their work and the mental states of being in a body that is not well. Frida Kahlo and Sylvia Plath were two very well known artists that came up.

With Frida Kahlo, I was just so fascinated by the way her body was her art in the sense that the images we know of her are so often her own image, her own face. She was horrifically injured in an accident with a bus and a streetcar when she was young and she had very bad chronic pain for the rest of her life. And so she sometimes spent time in these plaster corsets and there are images of her painting herself in bed with a mirror. She was stuck in this body in pain, but it became her subject and it became her focus, both herself and the body and everything to do with the body. That, on one level, just really, really interested me as a way gesture to her.

In a similar way, Sylvia Plath has this poem In Plaster, which I was fortunate to get permission to quote a little from in the book, and that is about a woman lying in bed in a full plaster. But then slowly the plaster starts to come to life and wants to take on its own personality. The woman is trapped in it, but the plaster wants to get up and breathe and be her own person. This eerie, second self or shadow self starts emerging and it's just an incredible poem.

So there are these big names and these big themes drawn from Frida Kahlo and Sylvia Plath, but I didn't want to directly represent who they were necessarily. But there's just so much in their work that wanted to make quite a bold gesture to them as a bit of recognition.

KB: My older sister, at some point, shared an article and it was a blog that she'd found online. It was written by somebody who had the same kind of inflammatory arthritis as me. She was only a year or two older than me and she lived in the States, in New York. So I read the blog and it was about her day-to-day life, but with a chronic illness.

That really meant something, reading this woman's blog. I wrote to her afterwards and I said thank you for sharing this experience because I have not had that chance to read about somebody my own age with this arthritis.She wrote back and that was, 15 years ago and we're wonderful friends now. I've been to New York to visit her. We call each other "family abroad."

I think that's probably this similar parallel to what it might have been like to read a novel about chronic pain then, the sense of some kind of recognition.

Of all my books, this is the one that I've heard from people so often after publishing it. The book has helped maybe convey the dailiness of being in the body with chronic illness. I think maybe if I was a younger person reading that, I might also have felt that.