Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene

"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

Winner of the 2024 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award


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?

Lorraine Boissoneault is a writer and journalist covering science, history, travel, and current events. Author of The Last Voyageurs, Boissoneault has previously been a staff writer for Smithsonian Magazine and an editor for The Weather Channel. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, National Geographic, The Atlantic, Playboy, Catapult, Audubon, Slate, and many other outlets.