“This book doesn’t offer easy answers, but it offers something better—a way of seeing our shared vulnerability as the starting point for understanding what’s breaking and what still might be saved.”—Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
Winner of the 2024 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award
Science writer Lorraine Boissoneault has been in pain for most of her adult life. Unable to control or make sense of her chronic illness diagnoses, she began describing the ebb and flow of her symptoms as “body weather.” At first an imaginative approach to coping with flare-ups, the phrase has become a waypoint in Lorraine’s explorations of the intimate relationship between our fragile bodies and the world around us.
Visceral and poetic, these braided essays traverse science, history, and memoir to explore the interconnected relationships between the human body and Earth’s meteorology—2 chaotic systems that inform every cell of our beings. Boissoneault surveys her own “body weather,” relating her dysregulated thyroid to global temperature fluctuations; her arrhythmic heart to chaotic thunderstorms; her inflamed joints to wildfires beyond control.
Body Weather is a lyrical exploration that reimagines the cloudy stages of grief and challenges us to reexamine universal questions lodged deep within: how do we find comfort and meaning in a fevered world?
“Recommend this haunting, heartbreaking, yet still hopeful title to readers who like to feel everything they read.”
—Library Journal
“A dazzling kaleidoscope of natural and personal history crackling with intelligence . . . Lorraine Boissoneault is a force of nature.”
—Sarah McColl, author of Joy Enough
“From grand sweeps of scientific history to poignant slices of memoir, Body Weather connects the challenges of the planet to the trials of the body and dares to imagine a future where we address both with humanity. It’s a singular, stunning book.”
—Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of An Immense World
“Body Weather refuses the distance between personal collapse and planetary collapse, insisting, with unflinching honesty, that these crises are one and the same. She writes from inside a sick body on a sick planet and, in doing so, creates something far more urgent than forecast or diagnosis: a reckoning.”
—Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
“Lorraine Boissoneault elegantly twines our unstable bodies and ravaged planet and demands an upwelling of care for us all. Body Weather is revelatory, enraging, and nothing less than a paean to survival.”
—Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches
“A lyrical, unflinching look at what it means to live in a sick body, on a sick planet . . . By taking us on her journey, [Lorraine] teaches us not to live without grief—but alongside it.”
—Rachel E. Gross, author of Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage
Prologue: Weather Walks
PART ONE: TEMPERATURE—THYROID—DENIAL
When the Temperature Has Teeth
Heat Waves, Hormones, and Self-Control
Death Valley and Devils Hole
PART TWO: STORMS—HEART—FEAR
The Meaning of a Storm
Broken Bodies Electric
Befriending Fear
PART THREE: FLOODS—UTERUS—ANGER
Witch Hunts
Wherever Water Goes
Flood Memory
PART FOUR: LANDSLIDES—GUTS—GRIEF
The Breakdown
Microbial Mayhem
All We Have to Lose (or Save)
PART FIVE: FIRE—JOINTS—RADICAL LOVE
Bent Bodies and Hidden Fire
Colonial Control
Our Disabled Ecologies
Acknowledgments
Notes
Lorraine Boissoneault’s Body Weather
Readers’ Guide Discussion Questions
Download the discussion guide.
- Body Weather wrestles with the meanings we attach to illness. What cultural narratives or personal assumptions have shaped the way you think about different diseases, and how has this book invited you to reconsider them?
- Denial is a throughline of this book—in medicine, in climate discourse, and within the self. Where do you see denial operating in your own life or community, and how does it shape our collective ability to face difficult truths?
- Body Weather presents the natural world—flora, fauna, meteorological phenomena—as a mirror for the human body. What insights or resonances did you find in these connections between our inner ecosystems and the planet’s shifting climate?
- Boissoneault acknowledges the weight of climate anxiety—especially on young people—while also emphasizing the need to move through fear rather than be paralyzed by it. What does facing and accepting this fear look like for you? How can you still take action even when you’re afraid?
- This book speaks to how women’s pain, wisdom, and lived experiences are so often minimized or disregarded. Have you ever encountered a moment when being believed made a difference or when disbelief caused harm? What did it teach you about listening to yourself and to others?
- In Boissoneault’s stages of grief, anger can be both destructive and clarifying. When has anger helped you better understand your values, set boundaries, or confront injustice?
- Body Weather presents grief as ever evolving, something we grow alongside rather than “get over.” What is your relationship with grief, and how do you make space for it when it arises?
- The ongoing legacies of eugenics and ableism reveal how societies arbitrarily define vulnerability and power. How do our institutions determine whose bodies are valued and whose are expendable today? What might community care and resistance look like for you?
- For millennia, Indigenous people around the world have used fire for cleansing and restorative practices. The element has also been weaponized by colonists intent on removing and controlling these First Peoples. What does this overlap tell us about becoming better stewards of the land?
- Body Weather concludes with an invitation of radical love: for people, for communities, and for the land itself. What might radical love look like in your daily life, and how could it change the way you imagine the future?