Body Weather
Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene
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Body Weather
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About this listen
Winner of the 2024 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award: “A singular work of literary reportage, a firsthand, intimate account drawing profound connections between the body and the planet”
Science writer Lorraine Boissoneault has been in pain for most of her adult life. Unable to control or make sense of her chronic illness diagnoses, she began describing the ebb and flow of her symptoms as “body weather.” At first an imaginative approach to coping with flare-ups, the phrase has become a waypoint in Lorraine’s explorations of the intimate relationship between our fragile bodies and the fragile world around us.
In visceral and poetic prose, Body Weather traverses science, history, memoir, medicine, and time to explore the interconnected relationship between the human body and Earth’s meteorology—two chaotic systems that inform every cell of our beings. Boissoneault relates her dysregulated thyroid to fluctuations in global temperature; her retroverted uterus and frequent UTIs to catastrophic floods; her inflamed joints to wildfires beyond control.
Reimagining the cloudy stages of grief, Body Weather challenges us to reexamine universal questions lodged deep within: how do we find comfort and meaning in a fevered world?