Cahalan's style here is personal, inviting the reader into the depths of the most terrifying time of her young life with charm and generosity. The chapters are short and punchy, often about the length of a story from Cahalan's beloved New York Post, and very easy to whip through. Cahalan's background as a tabloid reporter comes through in every page and Brain on Fire is a highly readable account of a young woman losing her grip on reality, clinging on through the love of her family and the hard work of medical staff. Cahalan was also unable to remember basic words and suffered a physical numbness down one side.īut don't let that put you off. There are a few similarities with demonic possession, and the disease itself is suggested as a possible explanation for symptoms previously explained as possession: seizures, hallucinations, paranoia, hysteria, motor problems like physical spasms and an apparent ability to stay in uncomfortable positions for a long time. To say the disease – NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis, in which the body's immune system attacks the brain – possessed Cahalan isn't an exaggeration. By the final chapters, the reader is also much more informed about the symptoms and the workings of the human brain – without there ever being an information overload or any overly technical jargon. It feels as though Cahalan comes to terms with the disease that possessed her by researching it and trying to understand it, and finally by writing about it (she's a journalist, after all). She also uses a collection of notebooks, journals and scribbles, some written by her in a time she has no recollection of at all. In many ways it's a cathartic process (for the reader too, by the end), with Cahalan using her journalistic skills to piece together what happened from her own fragmented memory and interviews with doctors, friends and family. In Brain on Fire, Cahalan – now in the 'post-recovery' stage of her life – attempts to recapture the memories and events from her 'month of madness' before diagnosis and cure. Within weeks a mysterious illness reduced her to an incoherent shadow of her former self, struggling with basic tasks, and left doctors at one of the world's top medical centres baffled. One day Susannah Cahalan was a bright, outgoing tabloid reporter in New York, with a promising career ahead of her.
At times moving, at times graphic, but always unflinchingly honest.
Summary: This is the story of New York Post reporter Susannah Cahalan's mystery illness and her descent into madness, the deep soul-searching prompted when the disease called into question basic assumptions about the author's personality and her slow road to recovery.
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