“I got sick the way Hemingway says you go broke: ‘gradually and then suddenly,’” Meghan O’Rourke writes in The Invisible Kingdom, describing the beginning of her decades-long struggle with chronic autoimmune disease—and, in turn, the subject of her excellent new work of nonfiction. (The release also marks one of our favorite books of 2022.)In the late nineties, O’Rourke began suffering mysterious symptoms ranging from rashes to tremors to crushing fatigue. When she sought treatment, she became an unwilling citizen of a shadow world, where chronic illness sufferers are dismissed by doctors and alienated from their lives. The quest for diagnosis, treatment, and recognition would consume a decade of her life, leaving her confined to her home for much of her thirties, struggling to engage meaningfully with her work as a writer and professor. It would also leave her profoundly alarmed about the state of American healthcare, and at a loss as to what chronic illness meant for her identity. “To become chronically ill is not only to have a disease that you have to manage, but to have a new story about yourself, a story that many people refuse to hear—because it is deeply unsatisfying, full of fits and starts, anger, resentment, chasms of unruly need,” O’Rourke writes. “My own illness story has no destination.” In an elegant fusion of memoir, reporting, and cultural history, O’Rourke traces the development of modern Western medicine and takes aim at its limitations, advocating for a community-centric healthcare model that treats patients as people,… Click below to read the full story from Esquire
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