Susannah Cahalan - Brain on Fire - My Month of Madness

But she doesn’t, and she barely flinches when her loved ones tell her about the paranoid delusions that held her firmly in their grasp for several weeks. There’s no vanity in Brain on Fire —Cahalan recounts obsessively searching her boyfriend’s email for signs that he was cheating on her (he wasn’t) and loudly insisting to hospital workers that her father had killed his wife (she was alive). Cahalan is nothing if not tenacious, and she perfectly tempers her brutal honesty with compassion and something like vulnerability.

It’s indisputable that Cahalan is a gifted reporter, and Brain on Fire is a stunningly brave book. But even more than that, she’s a naturally talented prose stylist—whip-smart but always unpretentious—and it’s nearly impossible to stop reading her, even in the book’s most painful passages. Reflecting on finding a piece of jewelry she’d lost during her illness, she writes, “Sometimes, just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly.”

Brain on Fire comes from a place of intense pain and unthinkable isolation, but finds redemption in Cahalan’s unflagging, defiant toughness. It’s an unexpected gift of a book from one of America’s most courageous young journalists.

“Engrossing… Unquestionably, an important book on both a human and a medical level. Cahalan’s elegantly-written memoir of her dramatic descent into madness opens up discussion of the cutting-edge neuroscience behind a disease that may affect thousands of people around the world, and it offers powerful insight into the subjective workings of our minds.”

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Copyright © 2012 by Susannah Cahalan

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A note to readers: Names and identifying details of some of the people portrayed in this book have been changed.

First Free Press hardcover edition November 2012

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cahalan, Susannah.

Brain on fire: my month of madness / Susannah Cahalan.

p. cm.

1. Cahalan, Susannah—Health. 2. Cahalan, Susannah—Mental health. 3. Encephalitis—Patients—United States—Biography. 4. Autoimmune diseases—Patients—United States—Biography. 5. Frontal lobes—Diseases—Patients—United States—Biography. 6. Limbic system—Diseases—Patients—United States—Biography. 7. Diagnostic errors—United States—Case studies. I. Title.

RC390.C24 2012

616.8’320092—dc23 2012012670

ISBN 978-1-4516-2137-2

ISBN 978-1-4516-2139-6 (ebook)