Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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patron you'll also receive our weekly newsletter. Welcome to the Colette Podcast.

I'm your host Jonathan Kay.

And my first guest for 2022 is Ross Dauthon,

whose name should be well known to those listeners who make a habit of reading the New York Times opinion pages.

Dauthit, one of the few Conservatives at the Times, has been writing his column since 2009,

usually on politics, public policy, and religion. But in his new memoir,

titled The Deep Places, he gets much more personal, recounting his battle with Lyme

disease and the chronic version of that ailment, which his doctors believe has afflicted him for years.

The Deep Places is part diary, part medical investigation, and part Catholic religious meditation.

But it's also a survey of the odd place that Lyme disease occupies in our culture.

The term Lyme disease has been used commonly since the 1970s to describe the serious pain,

fevers, rashes, stiffness, swelling, and even temporary paralysis that can result

from deer-tick-borne bacteria and something like half a million Americans suffer from it every year.

But as Dauthut writes in his book, doctors still take radically different positions on whether

it's really a serious chronic condition.

At some points, doubt that thought that he might literally be going crazy,

as even his own doctors and relatives wondered if his conditions weren't perhaps psychosomatic. In fact, it seemed like that one little deer tick bite might not only cost him his health, but also his marriage and his career.

...