Susannah Calahan is the author of the bestselling memoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, in which she describes an amazing ordeal in which she was misdiagnosed with a mental illness that was actually autoimmune encephalitis that caused extreme psychotic symptoms. This experience sparked a curio...
Susannah Cahalan was a healthy 24-year-old working as a reporter for the New York Post when she began to have seemingly unrelated and inexplicable symptoms, such as memory problems, sensitivity to light, anxiety, mood swings, food aversions, and insomnia. Tests revealed nothing unusual, and her neu...
Brain on Fire is an interesting journey through a prolonged illness, the body's collapse, and the struggle to find not only a cure, but even an accurate diagnosis. Though the author is a reporter and makes many references to her talent and humor, I didn't feel that this was particularly well-written...
Susannah Cahalan was only twenty four years old when she woke up alone in a hospital room, unable to move or speak, and had no memory of how she got there. From this point, she relies on hospital reports, her journal, her father's journal, and other people's memories (who were close to her) during t...
She had worked at the NY Post for many years when she started to experience some unusual symptoms. It began with numbness and paranoid feeling about her boyfriend, these symptoms getting progressively worse as the days progressed. The 24-year old reporter then started to experience seizures and her ...
Original Publication Year: 2012 Genre(s): Non-Fiction, Medical Series: NA Awards: None Format: Audio (from Audible.com) Narrated by: Heather Henderson In 2009, Susanna Cahalan was a 20-something with a successful career as a journalist when her behavior became decidedly odd and erratic. It signal...
This feels a little like one of those books that was written because a story got a lot of press, and the author, who is a halfway decent writer since she works for a newspaper, decides, "Hey, why not write a whole book?" Perhaps she was even approached by an agent or editor with a request for someth...
Overall I found Brain on Fire to be interesting, albeit not terribly engrossing. The medical aspect of the account was by far more interesting to me than the personal account by the author, especially as her personality was oftentimes a turnoff. I also found the book bordered on too long, which may ...
The story itself is fascinating and scary. For me though, the writing style kept me detached. While I understand that the majority of the story had to be recreated from third-party sources, those portions of the book felt very clinical. I enjoyed the last quarter of the book better, when the auth...
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