This article presents a theoretical framework and a network of concepts that could be useful in analyzing illness narratives. As a relatively new field of the humanities, the cultural discourse of health and illness is still in need of an appropriate methodology and a set of handy concepts, i.e. a foundational cultural theory fit to deal with texts con-cerned with the specific experience of health and illness. Here the key concepts are fragility, reparability, vulnerability and harm. While drawing on the idea of ‘writing in a state of emergency’, based on Giorgio Agamben’s discussion in The State of Exception, the article also offers the author’s own conceptions of a ‘fragile alliance’ and of reading illness narratives as a therapeutic (restorative) activity.