It's hard to imagine a scenario more nightmarish, but for
Cahalan the worst was yet to come. In 2009, the New York Post reporter, then
24, was hospitalized after — there's really no other way to put it — losing her
mind. In addition to the violent seizures, she was wracked by terrifying
hallucinations, intense mood swings, insomnia and fierce paranoia. Cahalan
spent a month in the hospital, barely recognizable to her friends and family,
before doctors diagnosed her with a rare autoimmune disorder. "Her brain
is on fire," one doctor tells her family. "Her brain is under attack
by her own body."
Cahalan, who has since recovered, remembers almost nothing
about her monthlong hospitalization — it's a merciful kind of amnesia that most
people, faced with the same illness, would embrace. But the best reporters
never stop asking questions, and Cahalan is no exception. In Brain on Fire, the
journalist reconstructs — through hospital security videotapes and interviews
with her friends, family and the doctors who finally managed to save her life —
her hellish experience as a victim of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. The
result is a kind of anti-memoir, an out-of-body personal account of a young
woman's fight to survive one of the cruelest diseases imaginable. And on every
level, it's remarkable.
The best journalists prize distance and objectivity, so it's
not surprising that the most difficult subject for a news writer is probably
herself. And although she's young, Cahalan belongs firmly to the old school of
reporters — she writes with an incredible sense of toughness and a dogged
refusal to stop digging into her past, even when it profoundly hurts. One of
the most moving moments in Brain on Fire comes when Cahalan, preparing a New
York Post article about her illness, watches videos of herself in the hospital.
She's horrified, but finds that she can't look away. "I was outrageously
skinny. Crazed. Angry," she writes. "I had the intense urge to grab
the videos and burn them or at least hide them away, safe from view."
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. (NPR.org)
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