The book of a generation: a transformative look at chronic illness and autoimmune disease-from one of the country's most respected writers.
Drawing on her own medical experience as well as fifteen years of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, Meghan O'Rourke's incisive new work speaks to an urgent subject: the epidemic scale of autoimmune disease in America-even greater with the advent of "Long Covid"-and where we go from here.
Blending lyricism, erudition, candor, and empathy, O'Rourke reveals crucial, subtle complexities about the American struggle with chronic illness and autoimmune conditions, and offers new reasons for hope, as well as a new framework for thinking about infectious disease and autoimmune response going forward. Confronting everything from the challenges of diagnosis and treatment to the limitations posed by our traditional structures of medical care and the particular impact on various demographic populations, O'Rourke brings her deep and disparate talents and roles-critic, journalist, poet, teacher, and patient-together into one unified project, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier. Meghan O'Rourke is the author of The Long Goodbye and the poetry collections Sun in Days, Once, and Halflife. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and other awards, she is the editor of The Yale Review. Her writing appears in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and more.
