Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness Themes

Brain on Fire tells the story of 24-year-old Susannah Cahalan, a journalist at the New York Post who suddenly contracts the disease anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis. The disease temporarily changes Susannah from a driven, strong-willed, and passionate person into someone who is paranoid, angry, and mean. Most difficult for Susannah, who describes herself as a proudly independent person, is that the disease also makes her entirely dependent on her caregivers in the hospital, her…

As a journalist, Susannah possesses a natural talent for storytelling and crafting compelling narratives from truthful events. She prefaces her memoir by making it exceptionally clear that Brain on Fire is as much a memoir as it is a piece of reportage, given that she doesn't remember her month in the hospital and had to piece together what happened as though she were investigating someone else's story. In this way, the memoir explores how personal…

Susannah takes great care to situate her battle with her disease (anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis) in a historical context, in part because the history of the disease is so recent. Until 2007, her condition hadn't been identified and was often either diagnosed as unspecified psychosis or unspecified encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), depending on where a patient first sought help. As she recovers and learns more about her disease, Susannah feels a responsibility to share…