Brain on fire novel1/11/2024 ![]() ![]() Sargent hoped to enhance his reputation by painting and exhibiting her portrait. ![]() Madame Pierre Gautreau (the Louisiana-born Virginie Amélie Avegno 1859–1915) was known in Paris for her artful appearance. He asked Cahalan to draw one simple sketch, which became key to diagnosing her with a newly discovered autoimmune disease in which her body was attacking her brain, an illness now thought to be the cause of “demonic possessions” throughout history.Ĭahalan lives in Jersey City with her boyfriend and dog, Gus the Spinone. The exhausted doctors were ready to commit her to the psychiatric ward, in effect condemning her to a lifetime of institutions, or death, until Dr. As weeks ticked by Cahalan moved inexplicably from violence to catatonia, $1 million worth of blood tests and brain scans revealed nothing. Yet, only weeks earlier Cahalan had been a healthy twenty-four year old, six months into her first serious relationship and beginning a career as a cub reporter at the New York Post.Ĭahalan’s memoir Brain on Fire chronicles the swift path of her illness and the lucky, last-minute intervention led by one of the few doctors capable of saving her life. ![]() Her medical records-from a month-long hospital stay of which she has no memory-showed psychosis, violence, and dangerous instability. In Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, Cahalan recounts the one day that she woke up in a strange hospital room, strapped to a bed, under guard, and unable to move or speak. In 2009, Cahalan was the proud recipient of the Silurian Award of Excellence for the article “My Mysterious Lost Month of Madness,” on which Brain on Fire is based. Her work has also been featured in The New York Times and The Czech Business Weekly, where Cahalan worked when she studied abroad her junior year of college. These days she mainly covers books for the paper’s Postscript section. She has covered a wide variety of topics for the tabloid, from the quirky and the weird, to the dangerous and the criminal. Cahalan started as a “copy kid”-respon sib le for making coffee, handing out papers and sorting mail, dreaming that she would one day have a mailbox of her own. So when there was an internship opening a t the New York Post when Cahalan was entering her senior year in high school, she jumped at the opportunity.Ĭahalan has now been at The Post for ten years, three of which she worked full-time after graduating from Washington University in St. And for as long back as she can remember, she has had a deep love for newspapers. She currently works as a news reporter at the New York Post.Ĭahalan always knew she wanted to write, even when she was in elementary school, writing a “book” about familial dysfunction inspired by the afternoons she spent with her ba bysi tter watching The Bold and the Beautiful. Her award-winning work has appeared in the New York Times, Psychology Today, and Scientific American magazine. Susannah Cahalan is the New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness. "The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to." ![]()
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