Laura Hillenbrand
American author (1967 - )
- || At The Bottom
1987 -- Laura Hillenbrand was finishing her junior year at Kenyon College in Ohio, driving back to school with her boyfriend and another friend when she suddenly felt nauseated. By the time she reached home a half hour later, she was doubled over with chills and a burning sensation in her abdomen. Over the next few days, her condition worsened. She could barely hold down any food, and her muscles ached terribly. Finally, she woke up one morning to discover that she could not get out of bed. Doctors ran test after test but were unable to discover the cause of her distress. She took a leave from college and returned to her mother's house in Maryland. She had lost 20 pounds, and her lymph nodes were swollen. "During the day," she recalled, "I rattled with chills, but at night I soaked my clothes with sweat. I felt unsteady, as if the ground were swaying. My throat was inflamed and raw. A walk to the mailbox on the corner left me so tired that I had to lie down." She had difficulty reading words on a page and seemed incapable of focusing on a conversation long enough to understand it. As her condition worsened, "My world narrowed down to my bed and my window. I could no longer walk the length of my street." Her hair began to fall out, and her throat and mouth burned with a severe and seemingly incurable strep infection. As her body withered away and she sank into a deep depression, no one could tell her what was happening.
- || At The Top
2001 -- Laura Hillenbrand's first book, Seabiscuit: An American Legend, was released in March 2001, almost exactly fourteen years after she first began exhibiting the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome. The subject of the book was appropriate enough for someone in Hillenbrand's condition. It told the true story of a gimpy, underdog horse and his misfit jockey who somehow managed to become champions during the Great Depression, capturing the attention of the entire nation and making horse racing into one of the most popular sports of the era. Two weeks after the book's release, Hillenbrand's editor and agent called to deliver extraordinary news. "You're No. 1!" they shouted into the phone, explaining that Seabiscuit had topped the New York Times' bestseller list. A year later the book had sold 800,000 copies, and a film was in the first stages of production. (It would eventually be released in 2003 to similar acclaim.) Nearly a decade after its release, Hillenbrand's book has sold over a million copies. More importantly for her, it proved she could overcome -- if only temporarily -- a disease from which she will likely never recover. ''The illness got me used to accepting that I couldn't do or have very much. All possibility disappeared from my life,'' she told a reporter in 2002. ''Now, with all this love coming in and people believing in me, I can believe in myself. So in a way, Seabiscuit is to me what he was to people in the Depression. He is possibility.''
- || The Comeback
For almost a decade, Hillenbrand slogged through each day as the symptoms of her illness ebbed and flowed. At times she had more energy and could take walks and live a moderately active lifestyle; at other times, she could barely muster the energy to leave her bed. Nevertheless, she was determined not to live a life of total confinement and began to do some freelance writing for what she described as "an obscure [horse] racing magazine." She wrote a few short articles from her bed, earning $50 per story. By the mid 1990s, she was suffering from periodic bouts of vertigo and could only write a paragraph or two per day, but she persisted. In 1996 she stumbled across the story of Seabiscuit; she was familiar with the story, having owned an old children's book about the horse, but she became interested in the story of Red Pollard, Seabiscuit's jockey. The more she read about the unlikely pair, the more she wrote. What began as a short piece for the magazine American Heritage soon became Hillenbrand's obsession. With the aid of her boyfriend -- who stuck with her throughout her illness -- Hillenbrand spent the next two years researching and writing. "When I was too tired to sit at my desk," she wrote, "I set the laptop up on my bed. When I was too dizzy to read, I lay down and wrote with my eyes closed." By throwing herself into the lives of her subjects, she forgot about her own.
