This month, I am so pleased to welcome Megan O'Rourke to GabFest Reeds.

Megan has written a really engrossing book called The Invisible Kingdom.

The subtitle is Reimagining Chronic Illness.

This is a book about a silent epidemic of chronic illnesses that afflict tens of millions of Americans. Often the diseases

that Megan is writing about are poorly understood and frequently marginalized and undiagnosed

altogether. It's a harrowing book because of the subject matter,

but it's not at all harrowing to read. I actually found it to be kind of a page turner.

And because Megan is a poet, an incredibly discerning reader, it's infused with beauty and joy

from literature about all kinds of topics. So, Megan, you're investigating this

elusive category of, quote, invisible illness, autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease

syndrome, and now long COVID. Just tell us a little bit about how this began for you.

First of all, thank you so much, Emily. This is one of the first times I'm hearing my book described by a reader, and it's so

illuminating, actually, because I think I really worried that this would be a book characterized

by the narrative of chronic illness, which is recurrent and repetitive, right?

So I did work really hard

to try to give it a shape, and I'm in a strange way pleased to hear that it's a harrowing

page turner. But the book began for me, I think, in that experience of being in the grips

of a melez I had no name for. My experience of getting sick was one that

happened slowly over time and not dramatically. I opened the book by comparing it to Hemingway's

description of going broke gradually and then suddenly. So it was a little bit like someone walking

slowly into ever deeper water. I just didn't feel

great. I had strange symptoms, you know, headaches, brain fog, strange bouts of fatigue. But over

...