Description
"This book doesn’t offer easy answers, but it offers something better—a way of seeing our shared vulnerability as the starting point for understanding what’s breaking and what still might be saved." —Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
Winner of the 2024 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award
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 world around us.
Visceral and poetic, these braided essays traverse science, history, and memoir to explore the interconnected relationships between the human body and Earth’s meteorology—two chaotic systems that inform every cell of our beings. Boissoneault surveys her own “body weather,” relating her dysregulated thyroid to global temperature fluctuations; her arrhythmic heart to chaotic thunderstorms; her inflamed joints to wildfires beyond control.
Body Weather is a lyrical exploration that reimagines the cloudy stages of grief and challenges us to reexamine universal questions lodged deep within: how do we find comfort and meaning in a fevered world?
Table of Contents
Prologue: Weather Walks
PART ONE: TEMPERATURE—THYROID—DENIAL
When the Temperature Has Teeth
Heat Waves, Hormones, and Self-Control
Death Valley and Devils Hole
PART TWO: STORMS—HEART—FEAR
The Meaning of a Storm
Broken Bodies Electric
Befriending Fear
PART THREE: FLOODS—UTERUS—ANGER
Witch Hunts
Wherever Water Goes
Flood Memory
PART FOUR: LANDSLIDES—GUTS—GRIEF
The Breakdown
Microbial Mayhem
All We Have to Lose (or Save)
PART FIVE: FIRE—JOINTS—RADICAL LOVE
Bent Bodies and Hidden Fire
Colonial Control
Our Disabled Ecologies
Acknowledgments
Notes
