Meghan O’Rourke is the editor of The Yale Review and the author of The Long Goodbye and the poetry collections Sun in Days, Once, and Halflife. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. In The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (Riverhead Books), O’Rourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of “invisible” maladies that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID. Together they represent a silent epidemic of chronic illnesses that afflict tens of millions of Americans. These are diseases that are poorly understood, frequently marginalized, and can go undiagnosed and unrecognized altogether. Drawing on her own medical experiences as well as a decade of interviews with doctors, patients, researchers, and public health experts, O’Rourke traces the history of Western definitions of illness and reveals how inherited ideas of cause, diagnosis, and treatment have led us to ignore a host of hard-to-understand medical conditions that resist easy description or simple cures. In The Invisible Kingdom, she synthesizes the personal and universal into one monumental project arguing for a seismic shift in our approach to disease – and a radical new understanding of our bodies and our health.
