Thread by @r_prior

Here are some of my favorite books, usually memoirs, written by authors showing how life-changing disease transforms us physically, mentally, and spiritually. These are my inspirations in my writing:

First is brain surgeon Paul Kalanithi’s memoir “When Breath Becomes Air.” The 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist chronicles his journey through fatal lung cancer. It’s about all the things that make worth living and how to best use our dwindling time on earth

Another key one is @rgay’s “Hunger.” In reading a queer woman of color’s lifelong relationship to obesity and body shape, a few childhood traumas drove a lifetime of eating behaviors. Each of us has an “unruly body” somehow. Acknowledging that validates our humanity

Anne Boyer won the 2020 Pulitzer for her book “The Undying,” an angry and unflinching and delightfully erudite look into her own breast cancer, and the capitalist systems that *create* it. “They scan you. But they don’t scan the environment,” was one devastating line.

@DavidFajgenbaum’s Chasing My Cure in 2019: to an incredible story of a med student dying from Castleman disease who ultimately repurposed an old drug to save his life. Ideal model for patient-centric collaborative research. Similar schemes ought to be applied in many diseases

#MEDX friend Julie Flygare’s narcolepsy memoir “Wide Awake and Dreaming” is a model for how a patient can harness their condition into a life calling as an advocate running a non-profit and inspiring young people with narcolepsy to live vibrant lives

@suleikajaouad’s newly released “Between Two Kingdoms” masterfully covers the mysterious terrain of rebuilding the self following severe disease, in this case leukemia. Her courage and dignity show though. And her idea of a healing road trip is one that’s worked for me too.

@suleikajaouad’s and Anne Boyer’s books reference Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor,” the grandmama of 20th century illness writing. We all live sometime in the kingdom of the sick and learn lessons to bring back to kingdom of healthy.

I’m next looking forward to NYT columnist Ross Douthat’s memoir “The Deep Places,” about his five-year struggle with Lyme disease. I too have Lyme and have long lived in those deep uncertain places between diagnoses, #lyme, #mecfs, #longcovid etc

I’ve always dreamed of teaching undergraduates and more recently have thought more about what it might feel like to bring a syllabus of these powerful books to teaching students who may be reading and writing through their own struggles, medical or otherwise?

If a college or graduate course like this existed, what would you think worth adding?