"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
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?
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
“Body Weather is an astonishment—a dazzling kaleidoscope of natural and personal history crackling with intelligence. Lorraine Boissoneault’s expansive vision presents both the awesome wonders and delicate frailties of nature, from the cosmos to the tender, tenacious heart. Oceanic in scope and breathtaking as a lightning storm, Body Weather vibrates with the pain and rage of living in a female body on a sick planet. Lorraine Boissoneault is a force of nature.”
—Sarah McColl, author of Joy Enough
“I’m amazed at how seamlessly Lorraine Boissoneault dances between the physiological and geological, between the personal and universal, between grief and hope. From grand sweeps of scientific history to poignant slices of memoir, Body Weather connects the challenges of the planet to the trials of the body and dares to imagine a future where we address both with humanity. It’s a singular, stunning book.”
—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of An Immense World
“Lorraine Boissoneault’s Body Weather refuses the distance between personal collapse and planetary collapse, insisting, with unflinching honesty, that these crises are one and the same. She writes from inside a sick body on a sick planet and, in doing so, creates something far more urgent than forecast or diagnosis: a reckoning. 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
“Lorraine Boissoneault elegantly twines our unstable bodies and ravaged planet and demands an upwelling of care for us all. Body Weather is revelatory, enraging, and nothing less than a paean to survival.”
—Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches
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