Weekly Inspiration: Laura Hillenbrand

Most people with ME/CFS are aware that our #1 celebrity who shares our illness is the highly-acclaimed author Laura Hillenbrand, who wrote Seabiscuit and Unbroken. Both books spent hundreds of weeks on the best-seller lists and were made into very popular and acclaimed movies.

Much of the general population, however, has no idea that Hillenbrand has been horribly ill for the past 27 years and is mostly housebound. Even fewer people know that her horrible illness is ME/CFS. Because she is rarely able to leave her D.C. townhouse, she's not in the spotlight like other brilliant authors. She's not able to give book readings at bookstores, go on talk shows, or even attend the recent gala premier of Unbroken. So, her inspirational story and her life often stay in the shadows.

I was thrilled to see that the New York Times recently published an excellent interview with Hillenbrand that highlighted her unique challenges and little-known illness in an article titled The Unbreakable Laura Hillenbrand. It's not a perfect article, and the description of ME/CFS is sparse (clearly not much background research was done), but it's a very good article. The author does focus on Hillenbrand's illness and mainly on its effects on her research and writing processes, and it provides some much-needed attention to our illness which is rarely seen in mainstream media.

For a more complete version of Laura's story of ME/CFS, check out the wonderful personal essay she wrote herself, A Sudden Illness, that was published in the New Yorker on July 7, 2003. Here on the New Yorker's website, you can see how the essay appeared and read an abstract. A blogger has posted the entire essay in a pdf file.

So, Laura Hillenbrand is this week's Weekly Inspiration, both for her efforts to help publicize her illness and the effects of ME/CFS and also for her amazing achievements in the face of such monumental challenges. As a writer myself, I find her accomplishments truly inspirational and nothing short of miraculous.