The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #52: Jennifer Lunden
"For twenty years, researching and writing this book became my raison d'être."
Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.
Here’s the 52nd installment, featuring Jennifer Lunden, author of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. -Sari Botton
Jennifer Lunden is the author of American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life, published by Harper in 2023. Her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction, Orion, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, LitHub, and HuffPost Personal, among others. The recipient of the 2019 Maine Arts Fellowship for literary arts and a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Foundation Scholarship in Nonfiction, Lunden, a dual citizen, has also been awarded three grants from the Canada Council for the Arts. She has also received fellowships from Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Monson Arts, Hewnoaks Artist Residency, and the Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France.
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How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I’m 57 years old, and I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I wrote my first poem in second grade. It was about a squirrel.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life. It was published by Harper in 2023.
What number book is this for you?
That was my debut!
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
It’s creative nonfiction. It interweaves memoir with research.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
American Breakdown is a genre-crossing literary mystery that interweaves my quest to understand the source of my health condition with my telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James—the bright, witty sister of the writer Henry James and the psychologist William James—ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.
In 1989 I’d fallen ill with a case of mononucleosis, from which I never recovered. I’d been sick for five years when, in 1994, I discovered the Jean Strouse biography of Alice James at a used bookstore and pulled it down from the shelf. I’d heard about Alice. I knew she was the sister of the writer Henry James and the psychologist William James, and that she was bedridden with a mysterious illness almost her entire life. I wanted to read about Alice and her illness. That book changed my life.
What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?
In sixth grade my friends and I all decided to write novels, and our teacher from the year before volunteered to mentor us in a club, which was so generous of her. In ninth grade I began writing poems, almost daily. It was a kind of meditation, pulling me out of the world at the same time that it drew the world into me. I was fortunate to have two high school teachers who mentored me, and my parents were also encouraging. So early on I took on the identity of a writer. In 1989 I moved to Portland, Maine from my hometown of Peterborough, Ontario, and within a few months I’d fallen ill with a case of mononucleosis, from which I never recovered. The writing stopped. I was too exhausted to hold pen to paper, and the fatigue sucked the spirit right out of me.
I’d been sick for five years when, in 1994, I discovered the Jean Strouse biography of Alice James at a used bookstore and pulled it down from the shelf. I’d heard about Alice. I knew she was the sister of the writer Henry James and the psychologist William James, and that she was bedridden with a mysterious illness almost her entire life. I wanted to read about Alice and her illness.
That book changed my life. In Alice James, I felt like I’d found my kindred spirit. I wanted to write about her and me and our illnesses that were so similar and so similarly mysterious. For twenty years, researching and writing that book became my raison d'être.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
I knew it would be a challenge to write a book for a popular audience about an illness now known as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), a 19th-Century illness called neurasthenia, and the little-known diarist Alice James, who, in order to be recognized, had to be contextualized for most people as the sister of her two famous brothers. To make the book compelling, I knew I needed to interweave research with narrative, and since the book was in part about how our dualistic and mechanistic culture impacts our health, I felt it was important to write the book in such a way to connect mind and heart.
Because ME/CFS has been so long dismissed by the medical profession, by government agencies, and by the general culture, I felt I needed to integrate unimpeachable research into the book. So I had to read a lot of science, and as my high school science teachers will tell you, science was never my strongest subject. In order to get it right, I had to write very slowly, checking and double-checking my understanding and my verbiage, and of course I consulted with experts to make sure I got my facts right. It’s very easy to make a whole new meaning with one wrong word, if you don’t have the expertise to understand the nuances. I’m grateful to all those who helped me get it right.
It took years to find an agent. I wrote my first book proposal in 2004 and submitted it to about ten people. They all turned it down. In 2009 I tried again, and again it was turned down by several agents. But in 2018 I scored when Mackenzie Brady Watson of the Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency took it on. She has been a dream agent for me. She’s kind, responsive, dedicated, and savvy. She got the book into the hands of Karen Rinaldi at Harper, where I feel it received the best of care.
Writing the book was hard in many ways… most particularly that it took me over twenty years to research and write. But at the same time, I loved researching it and piecing together all these ideas and narratives. The process of discovery was thrilling, and the connections that revealed themselves blew me away.
Perhaps the hardest thing about writing the book was when I had a catastrophic relapse in 2019 and was so exhausted I couldn’t hold my hands up to the computer, even from my bed. It was terrifying. I missed my deadline by over a year.
How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?
I tracked down just about everybody I named in the book, sent them any excerpts that pertained to them, and asked them if they wanted me to use their real name or a pseudonym. In one case this involved tracking down a psychiatrist who made a big impact on me in our one session in 1989. Remarkably, he was still practicing. It was nice to be able to thank him personally, and I’m sure it was nice for him, too, to find out that one session could have made such a lasting impact.
I did not send it to the doctor who was dismissive of my illness; I simply changed her name and identifying details.
I offered to send it to my mother right before it went to press, but she declined, saying she was excited to read it when it was a book. When she did read it, however, she felt blindsided by some of the things I’d written about her. I tried to be as sensitive as possible when writing about her, but I think it would have been better for her if she’d read it before proudly recommending it to all her friends.
The decision whether to show a loved one something you’ve written about them, and whether to accept requests for changes or cuts, is so individual to each relationship. It’s not always easy to know the best thing to do, or to predict how people will respond to something you’ve written about them.
I showed my husband everything I’d written about him and got his permission to include them. He’s a private person, but he was willing to compromise for me, and I would have compromised for him. But I sure am glad those parts are in there.
American Breakdown is a genre-crossing literary mystery that interweaves my quest to understand the source of my health condition with my telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James—the bright, witty sister of the writer Henry James and the psychologist William James—ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.
Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)
Well, Jean Strouse wrote a brilliant and compelling 1980 biography about the obscure sister of the famous brothers Henry and William James. That book changed my life. It helped me feel less alone with my illness, and it sparked a curiosity in my mind that became a passion, and that became American Breakdown. I am so grateful.
A perhaps unexpected influence was Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which inspired me because of how he took a subject that could seem small and straightforward—his home—and turned it into wide-ranging inquiry that was utterly fascinating.
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?
My biggest advice is that if you feel like you have something to say, PLEASE step into your light (or darkness) and write. Also, don’t feel like you have to be an expert in something in order to write a book. You can do the research and learn what you need to know. And understand that a rejection from a journal or residency is not necessarily a reflection on your work. JUST KEEP GOING. And by “just keep going,” I mean keep writing, keep submitting, and, importantly, keep requesting feedback from friends, writers, teachers, and perhaps even paid editors, so that you can make your work as strong as possible. It's easy to take writing workshops now no matter where you live, because you can find so many online. A writing group can be really helpful, too, for receiving feedback and support, and for accountability. And read books and essays about craft.
What do you love about writing?
Writing helps me form order out of chaos. It helps me make sense of the world as I experience it.
What frustrates you about writing?
I think it’s probably fair to say that every writer gets far more rejections than they do acceptances. I’m pretty good at accepting rejections as just part of the game, but the whole thing is so time-consuming.
What about writing surprises you?
This is small, but it also points to something bigger, I think. Since I was a teenager, sometimes while writing a word will come to me that I’ve never used before and I’m not even certain of its definition, but it seems like the right word. And then I’ll look it up in the dictionary and it does in fact mean what I wanted it to mean. It blows my mind that there’s stuff in there that I am not conscious of that will come out in my writing.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine or writing at specific times?
I’m a night person, so I wake up around 9:30AM and it takes me awhile to get going. I get all the duties for the day done first so I can just immerse myself in the writing for the rest of the day without distractions. That said, I find extended periods of focus a little excruciating, so I tend to take lots of little breaks to pull my mind out of the project. Kind of like stepping away from a jigsaw puzzle so you can return to it with a fresh mind. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.
Because ME/CFS has been so long dismissed by the medical profession, by government agencies, and by the general culture, I felt I needed to integrate unimpeachable research into the book. So I had to read a lot of science, and as my high school science teachers will tell you, science was never my strongest subject. In order to get it right, I had to write very slowly, checking and double-checking my understanding and my verbiage, and of course I consulted with experts to make sure I got my facts right.
Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities do you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?
Talking with writer friends connects my mind and heart and stimulates my writing. And sometimes friends grace me with really good insights or questions or ideas for my project, just in the process of talking.
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
The working title of my next book is River Swimmer (thanks to my friend Sofia Ali-Khan and one of those sparkling conversations!), and it’s about the Maine river I swim in every summer and the animals and people I meet there. It’s about awe and connection, and writing it makes me so, so happy.
Can't wait to read this book. Sounds fascinating! Thank you for writing it!!
Thank you for this interview. It’s fascinating and inspiring to read Jennifer Lunden’s comments about her writing.