At 24, Susannah Cahalan is beset for serious and ever-worsening symptoms from hallucinations and migraines to paranoia and intense elation. Diagnosis of severe seizures lands her in the hospital completely unable to function and without hope until one in a vast parade of doctors happens to ask her to draw a clock. After she painstakingly draws a circle with the numbers 1 through 12 crowded onto the right hemisphere of the face, the doctor thinks he knows what’s wrong: “her brain is on fire.” Anti-NMDA autoimmune encephalitis. Cahalan is a reporter at the New York Post and her writing is the taut, straightforward kind I love; in fact I wished I could have read this as a long-form article in The New Yorker or The Atlantic.  Cahalan is in remission but this book left with me a deep uneasiness about how prevalent and mysterious and debilitating autoimmune disorder (whose affected population is 75% women) is.
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