My first book, Auto-Immune Heresy, is available now
224 pages of essay, prose and poetry. Available as a paperback, an ebook, and an audiobook.
After 8 years of writing, my first monograph is available to order:
224 pages of essay, prose and poetry. You can get it directly from me; you can contact your favourite bookstore and ask for it; you can order it from Big Book--as you like, it is available as a paperback, an ebook, and an audiobook.
There is a launch event happening friday, Feb 23, at 266 Rue Saint-Viateur Ouest, Montreal, as of 6pm. Details here.
I wrote and self-published Auto-Immune Heresy out of a need to speak. To give voice to an experience that has been mine and is infinitely larger than me. I am speaking about sickness. Long-lived, recurrent, and entangled with the entire 21st century into which I was launched. It collects 8 years of writing about 25 years of chronic healing.
This book is a means of narrativizing my life. It follows my thinking and feeling through the complexities of embodiment. This project is one of inscribing questions rather than alleging answers.
It delivers a mythopoetic account of chronic sickness and perpetual healing, weaving poetry with essay. Making a hypersigil of healing from the false and harmful notions that shaped my body's systems. The story is foremost one of healing. Healing as a practice and process that is ongoing without end. The principal actors in the narrative are my body, the patient (an abstraction of me), maman, the doctors, and the bloodstream extending beyond humanity.
The project is first a memoir steeped in a 20 year personal history with the diagnosis of chronic immune thrombocytopenia, an uncommon autoimmune condition. Second, it weaves critiques of health/healthcare with notions of disability justice, in tandem with my personal reflections on living with blindness and being trans. These personal storylines are told against a backdrop of coming to terms with non-binarism, living a sacred life, and accepting the loss of cultural narrative amidst the widespread denial of climate collapse, with the associated grief.
If this work resonates with you, please share it with your peers, forward them the link or this email. I am sharing in the hopes of contributing to the ongoing conversation.
Now, I'm two years into total remission. Tomorrow, I'm turning 28 years old. Next week, I'm leaving for Amritapuri, India, to continue the long pilgrimage back to my own body. Stay tuned.
In friendship,
Laure Marin de la Vallée
