Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Girl Interrupted

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

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As someone who has been both correctly diagnosed and misdiagnosed with conditions concerning my brain, I was really interested in Susannah Cahalan’s story once I heard about it (I’m also just a weird disease junkie in general). Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis is a terrifying thing — one of those autoimmune disorders where the body just goes into attack mode on itself for unknown reasons. It results in a cascade of symptoms, starting from something that looks like the flu to a range of major behavior disturbances […]

Part history of mental health, part investigation into an infamous mental health study.

The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness by Susannah Cahalan

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When I read Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan’s memoir about her experience with psychosis, I became a little obsessed with it. (The Netflix adaptation was disappointing, as the clever hook in the book was her investigating her own illness from an outside perspective, something she could do as she lost most of her memory from when she was sick. The film just follows it straight. But that’s a digression.) Brain on Fire is an extremely readable memoir about a very scary and rare thing that […]

Well, this disease sounds terrifying…

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I’ve seen Brain on Fire a few times at the bookstore, and it was the subtitle that kept catching my eye – “My Month of Madness” – and so when I found it on sale, I picked it up. I thought I would be getting a book about a Nellie Bly-style reporter who feigns mental illness to write an expose on our country’s health care system. Instead, I got a terrifying account of what happens when a young woman can’t get the right diagnosis, and […]

Medical Mysteries FTW

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It took me a while to really get into Susannah Cahalan’s autobiography, Brain on Fire, simply because I was listening to it as an audiobook when I started The Martian, also on audiobook. And while Cahalan’s mystery disease certainly fascinated me, it’s hard to compete with an astronaut stuck on Mars — even if he’s fictional. But once I devoted my full attention to her medical woes, she hooked me. “We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold […]

Paging Doctor Gregory House

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Susannah Cahalan’s memoir, Brain on Fire, went on my To Read List immediately following a review I read here on CBR7. A junior reporter for the Post begins having personality changes, mood swings and forgetfulness- symptoms she blames of having a cold, or the flu. When her symptoms persist she calls her gynecologist; she recently changed her birth control and is hoping what she is experiencing is related. She gets an MRI but there isn’t anything abnormal in her test results, however she returns to […]

Real life medical horror story.

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So, like you know how the first four seasons of House were super awesome and stuff? This book is sort of like that, except instead of seeing it from House’s perspective while he’s being an asshole, we see it from the patient’s, and we are intimately connected with her as she slowly and surely comes unraveled totally and completely. She has no control over her actions, she loses all sense of herself and connection with her friends and family and co-workers, and the doctors have […]



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