Writing Your Resilience Podcast
Transcript for Episode 21:
Writing about Chronic Illness and Crafting the Hybrid Memoir with Jennifer Lunden
When I heard Jennifer Lunden speak at the 2024 AWP Conference about her battle with ME/CFS, I knew we were soul sisters. Then I read her book, American Breakdown and discovered she had a mental health background just like me. We had so much to talk about in regards to her memoir. American Breakdown has been praised by the Los Angeles Review of Books and Washington Post, and called a genre bending masterpiece by Hippocampus Literary Magazine. Jennifer, who prefers to be called Lunden, is a pushcart nominee who was recognized as notable in Best American Essays. To learn about her many publications and awards, please see the show notes.
During our episode, Lunden and I explored the challenges of writing about illness, the decisions she made while structuring her hybrid memoir, and the grit all writers, but especially writers with disabilities, need to build in order to write their books.
Before we get to our interview, I have a few questions for you. Are you a writer with a disability? What practical struggles have you faced, like brain fog, mobility, finding the right assistive technology or having enough energy to write? How has your work been received? If you’re able-bodied, what thoughts do you have about chronic illnesses and illness narratives? Are any of you trying to write a hybrid memoir? If you are, what challenges have you faced? I hope you’ll ponder these questions as you listen along. Now, let’s get to my conversation with Lunden.
Lisa [0:00]
Well, hello, Lunden. It's so good to see you today. So, I'm going to hold up your book just to get started—American Breakdown. OMG, we are soul sisters. I'm so glad to have this. So, if you're listening, you might hear the swish of me holding up the book. Now you like to go by Lunden, or at least with friends.
Lunden [0:17]
Yes, with everybody.
Lisa [0:20]
Tell us a little bit more about that.
Lunden [0:22]
I'm just going to tell you the short version, which is that there are a million Jennifers. I have many friends who are named Jennifer. I have a stepsister named Jennifer. And so ultimately, when I was in a group of friends, which included a Jennifer, I got requests for Lunden, and that was decades ago. I like now that when I call somebody, I can say it's Lunden, and they know who it is. If I said it's Jennifer, I’d have to tell them which Jennifer.
Lisa [0:50]
I love that because as a Lisa born in a certain era, I have that same issue. When I was in high school, there were five of us. I worked in this company, and there were also five of us. People would say, "Lisa," and we would all go, "yes." So, I love this. So, I'm glad that you are Lunden. And Lunden, you have an amazing book that I think everyone should read, whether they have a chronic illness or not. Because you are talking about so many important issues that affect all of us. What would you like us to know about your book?
Lunden [1:24]
I will start by saying that when I started writing the book, I was writing specifically about my illness, which is ME/CFS—myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome—and multiple chemical sensitivity. I'm going to go back in time a little bit and say that the impetus for the book was, I think, around 1995, when I read the biography of Alice James. Alice was the sister of the writer Henry James and the psychologist William James. But she spent most of her life in bed with an illness that was known at the time as neurasthenia. It was an illness that had swept the country. It actually affected both men and women, but the treatment for them was very different. The women were sent to their beds, and the men were sent west to dude ranches and stuff to sort of learn how to man up. But anyway, when I met Alice, she had such a sharp wit and such a survivor’s spirit. I felt like I finally had company with this devastating illness that I'd been living with for the past five years. I got curious about whether her illness and mine might be one and the same. My illness had been maligned by the medical system, by researchers, and by the CDC, and was—and still is—underfunded, and was—and still is—misunderstood, though it's much more understood now and was finally, several years ago, validated by the Institutes of Medicine as a real multi-system illness that affects us.
That led to me researching Alice's life and her context and writing my own memoir within the context of my culture. All of that led to this bigger picture of not just Alice and me and people with these kinds of illnesses, but what is the bigger picture of how America's particularly virulent form of industrial capitalism impacts everyone’s health. That includes the EPA and FDA being in the pockets of corporations so that they don't adequately protect us from chemicals, including the chemicals we bring into our own homes. Yes, and that includes the culture of stress here in the United States, where we have so few vacation days. Some people don't get any vacation or sick days, which is very different from most other wealthy cultures. The economic divide between the rich and the poor has led us to scramble to make enough money, particularly since about 1973 when unions started declining.
So, I've already just gone on and on. But what I'll just say is that in the process of researching Alice's life, my own illness, and my cultural contributions to my illness, I learned so much and I was so curious about all of it. I ended up going down a lot of rabbit holes and finding that they all interconnected. That was what was really satisfying for me, creating a synthesis. It isn't just about people like me with ME/CFS. It's about all of us.
Lisa [4:53]
I think that was some of the stuff that was really satisfying for me as a reader, who also has had the diagnosis of ME/CFS. I remember hearing about it in the 1990s in popular culture. It was the made-up disease, the yuppie disease, all this stuff, and then seeing it on my chart. In my case, you know, there can be many different triggers. And that's one of the things you talk about in this book, which is so smart. There are so many great things in here. In my case, I had Lyme disease, which also coincided with mold illness, and all these other things that tumbled together and landed me in ME/CFS. I also had chemical sensitivities at a certain point, though not as severe as yours. So, when I was first diagnosed, and I was in the throes of all of this—in my case, I had tremendous physical pain, coupled with a crippling fatigue that unless you've experienced it, you have no idea what it's like. This is how it felt to me: I can't lift my arms, like just this much felt like so much work. I could barely do it. So, when I was first starting to write about this, and experiencing a lot of doctors who didn't understand or who were dismissing me, or, you know, all the different things that happen to people when they have these kinds of misunderstood illnesses. I had writers telling me, nobody cares about your pain when I would go into deep detail around what I was going through. Then I also felt this need to research everything to the nth degree, so I could talk about like, the molecular nature of XYZ, so it coincides with blah, blah, and let me tell you about this lab report. I knew all that stuff. And so, when I was reading about all these rabbit holes, it felt familiar. Did you receive that kind of feedback when you first started to write about just your story? Did that happen to you? Or did you have a different experience?
Lunden [7:11]
It didn't. I'm really sorry that that's the message you got from people in your writing group. I'll actually say, like, at this point in my life, I'm always very interested and curious to read about other people's illnesses, even the ones that are different from mine, because, well, you know, there's a Virginia Woolf quote that many of us quote, that’s in the front of my book about why isn't illness in the books, the way that love and romance and war are, because it's just as complex and interesting. She said it way better than that. But it is true. So, for me, I knew I wanted to write a book that would help vindicate people with this illness. What lit the fire under my ass was a doctor who appears early in the book, who was dismissive of my illness, and told me that I was just depressed, and it would be best for me to get back to work. This is when I was so disabled by fatigue that even holding up a book, or talking on the phone with a friend, was too hard for me. I guess I could say bless her heart, because that awful situation created a lot of fire for me and knowing that a lot of people with illnesses like chronic Lyme disease, complex multi-system illnesses that primarily strike women and have been historically misunderstood and under funded, I wanted to be an ally, to get the word out and help validate it. So, I really was nodding my head when you said you were doing all the molecular research, because I was never good at science. But I had to read about science and write science to tell the story. There are multiple endnotes in the book, like 70 pages of endnotes, which makes the book look thicker than I would like because it's not actually that thick. Those endnotes are there for the skeptics who think that I’m making this up because I’m somebody with this illness. We know that we're going to be dismissed and disbelieved. We have to back up our experiences with peer reviewed research to be heard. So that's what I did.
Lisa [9:31]
I can't tell you the number of people that I know who have had these kinds of multi-systemic illnesses, who also can rattle off research and tell you about all kinds of things because we are so dismissed. I have heard this so many times and I felt vindicated by reading your book. Plus, you explain it in a way that’s not just relevant for people who have these illnesses. It's like, hey, healthy person who thinks this couldn't happen to you, by the way, all this stuff is happening around you, that makes you vulnerable. And this stuff's been happening for a long time. It's not just speaking to the experience that people who have chronic systemic illnesses have, but it's speaking to what's happening to all of us, and all the vulnerabilities around us. And so, a curiosity I had as I was reading this, because I'm always thinking about structure, and how people are structuring their stories, your story has three parts. There is your story of dealing with this illness. There's Alice James's story of living with something similar. Then there is all this research. So, you have this beautiful, braided memoir, this hybrid memoir that teaches us so much and takes us on a journey. How did you know this was the right structure for your book?
Lunden [10:59]
I didn't plan it. So, one of the things that happens when it takes you over 20 years to research and write a book, and it's your first book, and you're still learning about writing. And not only that, but the culture of writing was changing. So creative nonfiction, it's been around for a long time, but it really started flowering, probably around the beginning of when I was writing the book. Now it's huge. I remember asking a friend who was in an MFA program, which I have not done, she said something about a lyric essay. And I was like, what is that, and they're very hard to define. But one thing that happened in nonfiction is the lyric essay and the idea of a braided memoir. When I was studying before I got sick, when I was in my first two years of college, I felt like the thing I couldn't do was write a linear narrative. But it turns out that I don't have to write a linear narrative. Now, in fact, I wouldn't have been able to because it's just not my skill set. But not only that, this book has many threads that can't be written in a linear way. So, I could take my weakness and turn it into a strength. And so, for me, in some ways, I knew I wanted to weave in Alice's story. I guess I knew from the beginning, I wanted to weave in all those things. I feel like that's not a satisfactory answer.
Lisa [12:37]
I think it's a great answer, because it’s what the process is. And so, on one hand, there was a part of you that knew all these ideas needed to come together in some way. The question was, how do you do it? And that's the thing that took a while to figure out.
Lunden [12:53]
Right, and I didn't know that I was going to end up having so many different threads. But I feel like as a writer, my superpower is basically using my intuition to figure out how to blend these things together. It amazes me. Maybe some of that also comes from having a poetry background. When I was in high school, I was writing poetry, and that also isn't linear.
Lisa [13:23]
Every writer thinks in a slightly different way. Some writers think very linearly. And there's nothing wrong with that. Other writers do not. I think learning how to embrace how you think about things is important, especially when you've gone through an illness like this that has so many spirals, and so many tentacles. I wonder if that also played a role. There were 1000 rabbit holes you had to go down to get well and so many things you had to learn and pull together that also complicated it. Do you feel like that experience of trying to get well was a piece of the driving force for you?
Lunden [14:21]
It was the driving force for how the book came to be in this form, now that you mention it. When I started writing the book, I hoped for a magic bullet. Somewhere along the line, I was going to find the magical biological thing that was going to prove that my illness was biological, and I would be cured. We know publishers and readers really like a narrative that ends with a happy ending, especially when it comes to an illness story—or any story. I probably wasn't even halfway through when I was doing all that research, and it was clear to me that this wasn't a magic bullet kind of illness.
Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm wrong. I could be wrong. But I believe that illnesses like ME/CFS, multiple chemical sensitivity, chronic Lyme, mold sensitivity, POTS, and long COVID—for sure. Fifty percent of people with long COVID also qualify for a diagnosis of ME/CFS. Those are illnesses that our medical system hasn't previously been prepared to work with. Because of the Cartesian idea of mind and body split, breaking things down to the smallest thing, and separating things into specialties and keeping them all far apart from each other, we have bodies that call for medicine to grow beyond that to the next stage, which is about these complex, multi-system illnesses.
I didn't have the language or the knowledge to consider my illness to be a complex, multi-system illness. I didn't think of that phrase until probably when I was done with the book, and I'm sure I'm not the first. But that requires a different kind of approach to medicine. It's a wonderful challenge we create, and we can be really irritating to doctors, because they think their way is the only kind of knowledge. My hope is that we’re building in such numbers, and voices like mine in this book, and more voices are coming to the fore. My hope is that it's creating pressure for medicine to change. I think long COVID is also helping to create that pressure to move to the next level.
Lisa [16:42]
I would say chronic Lyme is also doing this. When I first got chronic Lyme, it was seen as yet another made-up illness.
Lunden [16:53]
Yes, like all these illnesses that are considered made up or all women's illnesses that primarily affect women.
Lisa [16:59]
Exactly, yeah. Something for all of us to think about. It was seen as a made-up illness. People would say things like, "Oh, that doesn't really happen to people. The antibiotics should have worked," you know, blah, blah, blah. And now, because it's seen as a vector illness, and it's spreading like wildfire, more people are getting it, and it's kind of seen as legitimate now. But in 2012, when I got sick, it was not seen as legitimate. It was like, "No, that doesn't happen."
Lunden [17:33]
Yeah, absolutely. Yet there’s still a lot of misinformed doctors. Like ME/CFS, it's a lot more legitimized than it used to be.
Lisa [17:41]
Right. I think one of the things that also causes an issue for chronic Lyme is that—I was lucky in that I knew I had been bitten by a tick. I had pulled it off me, which does not always happen for people. And I tested positive on the Western blot. Many people do not. So, I was lucky in the sense that I had clinical data that was irrefutable. I'd been looking for that clinical data for years because other things had been happening that led to this.
When you talked about the magic bullet, that spoke to me so much because I remember when I first got ill, I had this conversation with my supervisor at the time, and I said, "Oh, I've just been diagnosed with Lyme disease." She apparently knew more than I did, and she was like, "Oh, would you like to go on family medical leave?" I immediately had this desire to punch her in the face. Like, "Are you kidding me?" And there's a whole reason why, based on generations of women in my family also getting ill in mysterious ways, which I think will at the very least be an essay and probably a book. But at the time, I thought I could just envision my health returning and set a deadline. If I just took these pills—at first it was like, "Okay, six weeks and I'll be better.” Then it was like, "No, January 1st of 2013, I'm going to be well." I kept doing that for a while and making myself absolutely miserable. You're laughing because you're like, "Oh yes, I know this, this."
Lunden [19:20]
The American story, right? I'm just going to think my way out of it. And if I can't think my way out of it, then it's my weakness and my fault.
Lisa [19:28]
I had so much shame around the fact that I could not make this better. And you know what I've learned? There are no magic bullets, at least I have not yet seen one. Most of the time, my experience, and the experience of most of the people I know, is that it's like peeling away an onion, layer after layer. It's like, okay, let's first look at whether it’s a virus or bacteria and treat that. But usually, even before that, you have to look at your detox pathways. Are they working? There's always this new layer. There are the layers that are the reason why you're sick, and then there are the layers of what needs to be repaired to get well because damage happens. You must deal with both sides. That was difficult.
That leads me to one of the things that you want to talk about, and I want to talk about too: the two types of grit you need to have to both live with an illness like this, which is like an ultra-marathon and then also the ultra-marathon of telling such a complex story. What do you have to say about the grit that's required?
Lunden [20:45]
I've never heard it described as like an ultra-marathon, which just feels—I've obviously never run an ultra-marathon, and even if I were well, I would never want to—but yes, I think that's a good analogy. Every single day, I mean, depending on how sick you are. I've been in all the levels from completely disabled, zero energy, even lifting my arm taxed me and cost more energy, to a period of full remission, which was amazing, and everything in between. But all of it requires grit is because people with these illnesses are seen as weak.
Anybody who's living with an illness like this is so fierce. Just to be in this body takes so much work. I had no clue when I got sick at age 21 how to be the detective of my own symptoms, make connections for why I might be having this symptom. Now it's just habitual. All the time, money, and energy that go into healthcare—and so writing a book, I have to say this, I think some of it is that I might have been born with a certain tenacity. We all have strengths and weaknesses. The opposite side of tenacity is stubbornness, which isn't always seen as a strength. Some of the things that happened in my childhood helped to cultivate that tenacity. Having an illness like the one I did, and having to live with it in the face of a culture that was telling me I was weak, and I was wrong about my own body, requires a certain tenacity that not only requires, but cultivates a certain tenacity, I think.
I already had all those things going for me. I had been writing since I was a child. I had been well-supported by my parents and teachers and published in kids' magazines. Those successes gave me the tenacity to keep writing a book when I didn't have a publisher. I knew how hard it is to get a publisher. I just felt confident that I could get a publisher when it was time. This story was so important to me to tell. I needed to tell it for me, but I also really felt strongly that I needed to tell it for the world, so I just had to keep going. At first, I was just writing on weekends. I worked part-time as a therapist. I was still dealing with this body, so sometimes I didn't have the energy to do any work at all. Ultimately, I was a therapist, and I moved all my clients into three weeks so I could have one week a month to write.
The last piece I'll say is that in 2015, after I'd been working on the book since 2001, and I wasn't even halfway through, I was like, "This feels like an albatross around my neck." I am not somebody who usually quits things, but I gave myself permission to deeply consider letting it go so I could just write essays. I read a little bit of what I'd written and thought about how much I'd put into it. I decided I was going to keep going, but I needed support. That was when I began reaching out for grants and residencies. That support was crucial. Grit isn't just a quality a person has. Having the strength to go on is so relational. For me, the first grant I got was $1,000—not a huge grant, but it paid for one writing week for me. But the message behind it was "What you're writing matters, and we want to support you." That kind of thing energizes me to keep going.
Lisa [25:09]
Yeah. Some things that I'm hearing from this are number one, you had a strong sense of mission. And that sense of mission took you so far. But of course, when you're in it for the long haul, you're going to have moments of doubt and giving yourself permission to pivot, change your mind, and let this go created the freedom to choose. Sometimes we think the way we continue is by muscling forward and pushing, but sometimes pulling back gives us the opportunity to say yes and make an active choice. And part of the act of choice you made was to keep going, but also to seek the community that would help reinforce the power of the yes. Your life experiences, including being ill, helped you build, I’ll call it the mental fortitude to do this, because you do have to be fierce. And I agree with you. People who have these illnesses are considered weak. They're told they're weak all the time, you have a weak constitution and a weak mental capacity or there's always something. But to be able to question authority takes a lot of chutzpah. To be able to say things like I need to eat differently. I need to not blend in and do things my own way to promote my health, even though the rest of the world says you don't have to. That takes fortitude, especially if you grew up as a trauma survivor, like I did, where the fawning response was strong. I'm always like, oh, thank you, universe, for giving me the great opportunity to continue to practice this thing that is hard. But the practice, it requires so much fortitude. I think that can be this nice, positive feedback loop if we see it that way. Yeah. And it's also okay to not see it that way.
Lunden [27:12]
For me, I think that sense of mission is also with me in my life. And so, I've always felt like I can think of a friend who has ME/CFS and multiple chemical sensitivity and avoids talking about it, because she doesn't want to deal with the negative things that people will say. I've been fortunate that my parents, even when they didn't understand the ME/CFS, they tried. I think there's something about the way I present that people just don't say things directly to me. They might be thinking stuff, but they don’t tend to say things like, oh, it's all in your head, because I'm somebody who can step up and say, I have ME/CFS, or I'm somebody who can—I have to mask. I am not taking a chance on long COVID. And I will do that in public and in doing that, I probably help others. That helps me. When I was dealing with multiple chemical sensitivity, which is much less now, plus, I wear a mask when I'm out in the world and having to ask for accommodations, having to ask in classes for people to not wear perfume. Yeah, I mean, I didn’t want to do that. But I also felt like I was carving a path for the ones after me. And that helps. That helps me a lot to do those kinds of things.
Lisa [28:44]
I love how you're talking about the ways that we talk to ourselves, and the meaning we make around some of these really challenging things. Because we can think like, oh, I'm being a pain, and I'm burdening everyone, and oh, look at how difficult it is. And of course, there are times when we all feel that way. But keeping these other ideas in mind of like, yeah, in sharing my own experience. I'm giving someone else permission to do this too. I am paving the way because we aren't the only ones out there. There are plenty of people who are going through these things or who will go through these things. They're not going to know you know how to deal with them. Like one of my things when I was bargaining with the powers that be, and you know, there were times when I actually sat down and said I think I'm dying, and it was real. My liver was shutting down. When this happened, I’d think that this might be it. Then there were times where I thought, I think I want this to be it. I wasn't necessarily actively suicidal, but I didn’t think I could handle continuing to live like this. I had to get to a point where I was okay with dying. I was okay with not getting well. I had to let go at this radical level that was very difficult. But in doing that, I learned how to see the world in a different way. So much of this is training the brain. I think this is one thing I want to say to people. If you are living with one of these illnesses, and you are dealing with relentless anxiety, and relentless depression, which is a piece of the illness, it is not you. It is the inflammation that is part of the disease process. It is not you. It often does not respond to traditional treatment methods, like CBT is not going to help you get better. It isn't. Yes, talking about your feelings is helpful, but it will not make you feel better. Lowering your inflammation will help you feel better, and learning how to say it is not me—I’ve just found that to be important. Also, thinking about the story reminds me of something you have in chapter 14 of your book. There are so many things I want people to read in your book, but in chapter 14, when you're talking about narrative medicine, you talk about the three kinds of stories that people have: the chaos story, the restitution story, and the quest story, and how these stories impact us and how part of narrative medicine is helping people understand what their story is, and how to change that story. But also, that Americans have a certain kind of story. What is the simple version of talking about this that would pique people's interest so that they go and read all the great things you've said in your book?
Lunden [31:38]
First, I want to credit, Frank, I think his first name was Arthur Frank. He wrote The Wounded Healer. That might have come from The Wounded Healer. It's an amazing book, but I reference it in my book. But he the chaos story is—I think you described some of your own time in the chaos story and mine, like for me, it's the beginning of the illness or any big crisis that a person faces. At the beginning, we're in a chaos story, because we don't know how to make meaning out of it. We’re in deep grief, fear, whatever. We can't even think straight. And some of us might be standing in the chaos story for a long time, I feel like I did. Then there's the restitution story, which is sort of the modernist, it's like the previous way. I mean, it's a wonderful kind of story, the one I talked about where the person is sick, and the doctor is more like, this is kind of like the hero of the story, because the doctor is the one that gives them the magic pill, and they get better, and everything goes back to normal. Then there's the quest story, and being able to reframe, I felt so victimized by my body, and by my illness, like chronically for years. I just wanted my health back. I was 21 when I got sick, and I just wanted to be fully healthy. To be able to rethink my experience as a hero's journey story. In the book, I go into some more complexity about like, there's, there's some not great ideas, particularly for women about the hero's journey. Sarah Ramey in The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness, she did a ton of work, looking at goddess stories and came up with her own idea about what the heroine’s journey is, how it might be different. I love that stuff. But just to go back to this idea of the quest story, so whether it's a hero or heroine journey, there's a quest. For me to be able to think of my experience, instead of just being a victim, that I was somebody who was on a quest, I'm going on a quest for full recovery, that has shifted things. That would be lovely if that happened. But the greater quest is about learning about yourself. For me, I'm good at being in my head. I'm not so good at being in my body. So, it's been a lifelong part of my work to get more embodied. Even writing the memoir meant I had to get embodied. I couldn't just be in my head. We can't always control whether we're going to recover or how. But we do have some choice about the stories that we tell. I want to be careful about that too. Because if you're depressed, I don't know if you have a lot of choice, you can try, but it's like trying to push against something very, very powerful. But to be able to at least consider that there might be more than one narrative, and that you can change what that narrative is. So, for instance, if the narrative that you have is that your doctor has told you you're just depressed, and it'd be great for you to go back to work, and you don't know your own body, and you don't know your own needs, you can maybe change that narrative to I do know my body, and my doctor was wrong. My doctor learned in a context that fails to include people like me. That's just one example off the top of my head.
Lisa [35:32]
Here’s what I often tell people: Whatever your experience is right now, that’s your experience right now. It’s okay to embrace it, whether that experience is wonderful, or it absolutely sucks. Healing is the capacity to say this and what else, like this is true right now. And I think Laura Davis talked about this, she has this writing exercise she does with people, where she says, "This is how it is right now." Helping us honor that this is what it's like, whether it sucks, it's great, or you know, whatever it is, and what else. The more we can do that, the more we can get to something that to quote someone in your book, and I apologize, I forgot to write down the person’s name, "You may not be cured, but healing is always an option." I think being able to explore and be curious about what are all the stories that you could tell around this experience, even if you don't feel capable of doing it right now, I think is one of the ways we get to healing. Your book does this so well. And I think the quest is one way to do that. I was listening to this Hidden Brain episode, which I will put in the show notes. They were talking about how seeing your life as a quest improves your mental health and changes your outlook. I love the two quests that you talk about. There's the hero's journey. I love how you deconstruct and talk about the issues with it. We're not going to talk about it, because I want people to read your book, but you also talk about the heroine’s journey. I think this is the simplest way to think about it is this: The hero's journey is the journey to go out and slay the dragon; the heroine’s journey is embracing the darkness. Part of being a person with a chronic illness is learning how to embrace the darkness, because the reality of living with chronic illness is that the darkness doesn't necessarily disappear. You just learn how to live with it.
Lunden [37:36]
Yeah, and I'm thinking, I don't remember the quote—that’s in the book. That's something that I quoted Sarah Ramey saying, but she basically said that medicine has always been good at slaying dragons. But it's missed the other half about the willingness to go into the darkness. I get goosebumps, because she describes that willing to sit with empathy with a patient, and to just say "I don't know the answer. But I'm here with you right now." I had a doctor do that once. It was so transformative. It was way the hell better than a doctor saying, "I can't find anything wrong with you. Therefore, there's nothing wrong with you." That meant so much to me to read that. Also, I always felt like as a feminist, I needed to be strong and linear and all these other things. And she sort of gives permission like for this idea. This is a feminine construct within the idea that we're all on a spectrum of gender, that we can all embrace our femininity more. It’s better for us. Because the feminine side, in her way of researching, looks at how the person is able to notice something wrong in their body, and notice something wrong in the environment in a way that’s more subtle than other people might notice. They're able to call the alarms and call for change sooner before more harm is done. I also wanted to say something, because as you were talking about slaying the dragon. I realized that when I was writing the book, I wasn't slaying the dragon. I was getting curious about the dragon, and maybe even befriending the dragon.
Lisa [39:20]
That's a beautiful way to put it. I feel that in the ways you talk about this in your book. Well, you and I could talk about this for forever, and there are so many things that you say about how the brain works and all the stuff about the FDA and the Medical Association. Oh my gosh, there's so many things in here that I want people to read. But I want to end up with three questions I ask everyone. First, what is the best piece of writing advice you've received?
Lunden [39:52]
I already hinted at it, but I have the actual quote. I just read it somewhere because it's John Cocteau. He said, "Listen carefully to the first criticisms made of your work, note just what it is about your work that critics don't like…, then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping." I was also thinking about my first high school teacher, Mr. Cory. I had two high school teachers who took a lot of time out of their lives to mentor me. And I mean, I just showed up at their door, so they didn't have a choice. But he was the one. Mr. Cory was the one who taught me the idea show don't tell and helped me sort of cut a lot of the sentimentality out of my poetry about all the stuff about talking about my feelings. That was an important lesson to help me clean and streamline my writing. Years later, when I was studying creative nonfiction, I learned Oh, when you're writing essays, like creative nonfiction essays, you actually get to tell. You just have to earn it by following this pattern: Show, show, show, tell, show, show, show, tell. So that's another piece of good advice.
Lisa [41:05]
I love those pieces of advice. As a person who embraces the dragon, who lives with a dragon, who walks with the dragon, how do you nurture your resilience and that profound grit that has helped you write this book and helps you get through your days?
Lunden [41:26]
Well, one of my favorite ways is just lying in bed and reading. Or, even better, when the weather's right, is sitting outside. I live in Maine, so we have a short window, but sitting in a zero-gravity chair in the backyard and reading. But the other thing that really feeds me is swimming in the river where I swim for July and August, for about three months in the summer. That's been such a healing thing for me that I decided that that's what my second book is. So, I'm just starting to write my book about the river and the animals and the people that I meet there. It's all about connection. It’s a way to heal from the hard emotional labor of writing American Breakdown and having been a therapist for 15 years and living in this crazy country. I hope it will be a way for others to just dip into some healing and beauty.
Lisa [42:28]
I love it. It reminds me of Sarah Perry, who is someone that I interviewed about her book After the Eclipse, which is about her mother's murder. It’s also a very heavy story. And now she's working on a book about candy.
Lunden [42:42]
Oh, my god. So, see, it's a thing.
Lisa [42:45]
It is a thing. So, writers, if you're working on something hard, the next book should be something lighter. What I love about this connection point between American Breakdown, and what you're working on now, is that one of the first scenes with Alice James is her swimming in a river. It’s the point when she was at her most vital. I'm hearing that that is a place where you feel really vital. So, everybody needs to go get your book. What is the best way for them to connect with you and learn more about you in this book?
Lunden [43:22]
I have a website www.jenniferlunden.com. Lunden is spelled L-U-N-D-E-N. I'm most active on Facebook. So come and find me there. I'm on Instagram. I'm not very good at Instagram. The book is available anywhere books are sold. If they don't have it in stock, they'll order it for you. If you want to order online, if you order from bookshop.org, they send a portion of their profits to independent bookstores to help keep those independent bookstores alive.
Lisa [43:59]
You can also go to your independent bookstore and ask for your book. I think that's a great thing for all authors. You know, if you love an author, and you want their book, doing that helps to ensure it gets stocked in the store. It's showing demand. Also, you can contact your local library, especially if you don't have a lot of funds. Asking for the books at the library is a great way to get the book and not have to pay for it and support libraries and support authors. So, lots of great ways to do that. Then of course, when you love a book, do make sure to give it a nice review, because those things matter so much to writers. Those numbers are big. Well Jennifer, it has been an absolute pleasure. I am so grateful we got to have this conversation. My heart is full today and it is just connecting to yours even more as we talk about your book and about our shared experiences. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Lunden [45:00]
Thank you. So, it's been really invigorating to talk with you.
