Winner of the 2024 J. Anthony Lukas Book-in-Progress Prize
Science writer Lorraine Boissoneault has been in pain for most of her adult life. Unable to control or make sense of her chronic illness diagnoses, she began describing the ebb and flow of her symptoms as “body weather.” At first an imaginative approach to coping with flare-ups, the phrase has become a waypoint in Lorraine’s explorations of the intimate relationship between our fragile bodies and the world around us.
Visceral and poetic, these braided essays traverse science, history, and memoir to explore the interconnected relationships between the human body and Earth’s meteorology—two chaotic systems that inform every cell of our beings. Boissoneault surveys her own “body weather,” relating her dysregulated thyroid to global temperature fluctuations; her arrhythmic heart to chaotic thunderstorms; her inflamed joints to wildfires beyond control.
Body Weather is a lyrical exploration that reimagines the cloudy stages of grief and challenges us to reexamine universal questions lodged deep within: how do we find comfort and meaning in a fevered world?
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Advance Praise
“From grand sweeps of scientific history to poignant slices of memoir, Body Weather connects the challenges of the planet to the trials of the body and dares to imagine a future where we address both with humanity. It’s a singular, stunning book.”
—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of An Immense World
“Lorraine Boissoneault’s Body Weather refuses the distance between personal collapse and planetary collapse, insisting, with unflinching honesty, that these crises are one and the same. She writes from inside a sick body on a sick planet and, in doing so, creates something far more urgent than forecast or diagnosis: a reckoning. This book doesn’t offer easy answers, but it offers something better—a way of seeing our shared vulnerability as the starting point for understanding what’s breaking and what still might be saved.”—Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
“Body Weather is an astonishment—a dazzling kaleidoscope of natural and personal history crackling with intelligence. Lorraine Boissoneault’s expansive vision presents both the awesome wonders and delicate frailties of nature, from the cosmos to the tender, tenacious heart. Oceanic in scope and breathtaking as a lightning storm, Body Weather vibrates with the pain and rage of living in a female body on a sick planet. Lorraine Boissoneault is a force of nature.”
—Sarah McColl, author of Joy Enough
“A lyrical, unflinching look at what it means to live in a sick body, on a sick planet. Rather than inspire or despair, Boissoneault teaches us not to live without grief but to dance alongside it.” — Rachel Gross, author of Vagina Obscurca
“Lorraine Boissoneault elegantly twines our unstable bodies and ravaged planet and demands an upwelling of care for us all. Body Weather is revelatory, enraging, and nothing less than a paean to survival.”—Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches
“A fascinating read about how the health of Earth is inextricably linked to the well-being of humanity.” —Abby Norman, author of Ask Me About My Uterus
“In poetic and haunting prose, Boissoneault unearths intersections between her unique experience living with illness, while also illuminating universal questions lodged within all of us: How do we learn to live with discomfort? How do we seek refuge from our own bodies, from weather that wraps itself around the world?” – Judges’ citation for the 2024 Lukas Book-in-Progress Prize
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