The body is a doorway

by Sophie Strand

ISBN: 9780762487417

Published: 2025

A LIT HUB MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2025 In this lyrical, radically expansive self-portrait, celebrated poet, author, and lecturer Sophie Strand explores--with searing insight and honesty--the intersecting spaces of her own chronic illness, the complex ecology of a changing world, and the very nature of the stories we tell ourselves. At age sixteen Sophie Strand--bright, agile, fearless--is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, through both profound fatigue with the medical industrial complex and a deeply entwined relationship with the natural world, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding...