Back Draft: Meghan O’Rourke

An award-winning memoirist, journalist, poet, and editor, Meghan O’Rourke is also an excellent teacher, which is how we met. A decade ago, I took O’Rourke’s MFA poetry course at New York University; it was a wonderful experience, though my classmates and I sensed she was in quite a bit of pain. On an average day, she’d suffer debilitating fatigue, dizziness, and a sharp tingling that resembled electric shocks. Her body, she writes in her latest book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, “felt like a vow that had been irrevocably broken.”

The book chronicles O’Rourke’s labyrinthine journey toward diagnosis for a mix of poorly understood autoimmune diseases, while exploring how our healthcare system routinely fails patients who “live… at the edge of medical knowledge.” Much as Susan Sontag meaningfully changed the conversation around cancer, O’Rourke is attempting to shift how we conceive of illnesses in which the body is seen as attacking itself.

From the initial outline to the final draft, O’Rourke spent nearly a decade working on this book. Then, just as she was gearing up for publication, the pandemic hit. She knew she had to revise, to account for the emergence of long COVID. “Was it a difficult revision?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, “but not for the reasons you might think.”

— Ben Purkert for Guernica

Guernica: I want to begin with an apology.

O’Rourke: Why’s that?

: When I was your student, I never realized how much you were struggling. I knew you were