Lorraine Boissoneault’s hybrid memoir Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene is a fresh examination of the current climate crisis through the lens of the author’s personal health. Written with journalistic precision and a wealth of research, Boissoneault questions whether environmental factors precipitated her enduring health challenges. She ties the body and climate together through Dr. Elisabeth Kübler Ross’s five stages of grief, honoring what has been lost and learning how to cope in the world (and body) we have been given.
In a similar fashion to other well-known illness memoirs (Sick by Porochista Khakpour or The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang), Body Weather rests on the stakes of a patient so entrenched in the medical establishment that they feel detached from their own sense of self. How does a person retain their humanity when navigating a healthcare system that can feel so inhumane? Endless appointments, lab tests, and changing prescriptions can cause anyone to feel less human and more like a test subject.
That behavior of distancing the self from the body (and the self from personal agency) drives why Boissoneault structures her book in the braided form. The disconnect parallels the general public’s despair when facing climate change, an ongoing issue that has been swallowed in the noise of other current events. Boissoneault states, “When individuals feel completely disempowered to do anything against massive corporations—when we relinquish all responsibility—this helplessness can turn into a ‘denial of self-involvement’ that allows people to avoid personal responsibility.”
There are five sections to the book. One part is titled “Temperature – Thyroid – Denial” and
another is “Landslides – Guts – Grief.” Within the sections, Boissoneault discusses the planet
through multiple lenses: science, history, Greek mythology, linguistics, and even social
media. One would think the topics could muddle the subject matter, but Boissoneault’s expert hand utilizes relative ideas as informative transitions while her main themes drive the narrative.
Boissoneault is a trained journalist who has worked at Smithsonian Magazine and The Weather Channel. In 2022, she published an essay in The New Yorker detailing the development of her heart palpitations while bearing witness to noticeable climate change, an essay that galvanized her to expand the idea into a book-length project. Perhaps an experimental lens could offer answers that her medical team could not: What was the origin of her illness, and if discovered, would a diagnosis promise her a healthy life?
While there is an ongoing question of the “creative” aspect of creative nonfiction, I would argue this is even more challenging for journalists, who have a duty to present the facts and maintain ethical reporting. Their purpose is usually to inform and, at times, provide a call to action. Boissoneault does the latter within the book, usually after disseminating the complex mechanisms impeding attention on the climate crisis. However, the strength of Boissoneault’s work is her method. Her choice of scaffolding—and her success in its execution—is just as important as the content. In being able to weave these seemingly disparate topics together, and showing that everything is connected, she poses that our own response to the environmental crisis must be collective action. It will take adjustment on the social, political, and economic level for the kind of sustainability we need.
Like all patterns, readers become more attentive when the artist veers from the assumed form. The standard stages of grief as outlined by Dr. Kübler Ross ends with “Acceptance.” The griever is able to come to terms with the loss, to embrace the change, and thus move forward. Boissoneault’s final section replaces “Acceptance” with “Radical Love.” She explains, “The word, which comes from radix, means ‘root.’” It’s not enough that we simply come to accept the grief about how our planet has been irreparably damaged. Acceptance would mean that we simply embrace the path we are on; a different approach is necessary. On another level, the concept of radical love mirrors Boissoneault’s entire enterprise in writing this book. The deep research and the diving into personal pain, disappointment, and despair, has been that love in action.
This manuscript won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award which is “given annually to aid in the completion of a significant work of nonfiction on a topic of American political or social concern.” Upon beginning his second presidency, Trump signed an executive order leaving the Paris Climate Agreement, even though the U.S. makes the second largest carbon footprint in the world. Boissoneault’s book has arrived at a crucial moment in our ongoing fight against climate change. She takes on this topic while also laying bare her story of living in an immunocompromised body. The action is bold. Perhaps radical.
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Anita Gill’s work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Kweli, Prairie Schooner, The Offing, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her honors include Notable listings in Best American Essays, The Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Creative Writing. She is a recent alum of Tin House, Disquiet, and the StoryBoard Conference. She is based in Chicago where she is finishing her first novel.
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