Article archive / December 1, 2013
Originally published: . Volume 5, No. 4. Source pages: 12.
Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan
I'm currently reading Brain on Fire, by Susannah Cahalan. It's an autobiographical account of a very severe and frankly bizarre neurologic illness, written by a young woman who is a journalist for the New York Post. It's sharply written and very engaging. I'll take the liberty of saying that if the disease had killed her or permanently incapacitated her, she'd have needed a co-author, or at least a ghost writer. There is a deeply ironic aspect to her story, however, in that while she describes in detail the peculiar development and surreal phenomenology of her illness, she has very little memory of the period in which it was most severe, and consequently had to gather information from doctors, coworkers, family members, and medical records to describe what happened to her during that time. She was in the position of doing biographical research into her own history, one she herself cannot remember.
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