Friday, August 25, 2023 – 7:00 PM
In person at Brookline Booksmith! Celebrate the release of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life with author Jennifer Lunden, in conversation with women’s health journalist Catherine Guthrie.
Praised by the Washington Post as “[a] rigorous cultural critique…compelling, detailed, and absorbing,” this wide-ranging, genre-crossing literary mystery interweaves Lunden’s quest to understand the source of her own condition with her telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James—ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.
Masks are requested at this event.
RSVP to let us know you’re coming! Depending on the volume of responses, an RSVP may be required for entrance to the event. You will also be alerted to important details about the program, including safety requirements, cancellations, and book signing updates.
American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life
A Silent Spring for the Human Body, this wide-ranging, genre-crossing literary mystery interweaves the author’s quest to understand the source of her own condition with her telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James—ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.
When Jennifer Lunden became chronically ill after moving from Canada to Maine, her case was a medical mystery. Just 21, unable to hold a book or stand for a shower, she lost her job and consigned herself to her bed. The doctor she went to for help told her she was “just depressed.”
After suffering from this enigmatic illness for five years, she discovered an unlikely source of hope and healing: a biography of Alice James, the bright, witty, and often bedridden sibling of brothers Henry James, the novelist, and William James, the father of psychology. Alice suffered from a life-shattering illness known as neurasthenia, now often dismissed as a “fashionable illness.”
In this meticulously researched and illuminating debut, Lunden interweaves her own experience with Alice’s, exploring the history of medicine and the effects of the Industrial Revolution and late-stage capitalism to tell a riveting story of how we are a nation struggling—and failing—to be healthy.
Although science—and the politics behind its funding—has in many ways let Lunden and millions like her down, in the end, science offers a revelation that will change how readers think about the ecosystems of their bodies, their communities, the country, and the planet.
Jennifer Lunden is an author, poet, Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), and former therapist. The recipient of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for literary arts and the 2016 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction, Lunden, a dual citizen, has also been awarded three grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, one from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Monson Arts, Hewnoaks, and the Dora Maar House in the South of France.
Catherine Guthrie, author of Flat: Reclaiming My Body From Breast Cancer, is an award-winning women’s health journalist. For the past twenty years, her reporting, essays, and criticism have appeared in dozens of national magazines, including Time; O, The Oprah Magazine; Slate; Cosmopolitan; Prevention, and Yoga Journal. She has faced breast cancer twice. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.
