Brave Hearts

Bethesda native Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Seabiscuit and the new Unbroken, has overcome incredible hardships.

March 1, 2006 5:42 p.m.

The three loves in Laura’s life—horses, history and words—would eventually grow together to produce Seabiscuit, the underdog book about an underdog horse that, against all conventional wisdom about sports books in general and racing stories in particular, pushed its way to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list before a single ad appeared. Between hardcover and paperback sales, Seabiscuit held the No. 1 spot for 42 weeks and stayed on the list for more than 120 weeks.

“It was the best manuscript that has ever been submitted to me,” says Jonathan Karp, her editor at Random House, who now works at Warner Books. “It was an extraordinarily rich human portrait that went beyond the Seabiscuit horse-racing story to encapsulate something far more historically powerful. I wasn’t the only one who had this reaction. Everyone at Random House who read the manuscript fell in love with it. I remember in a sales conference one of our reps stood up and said, ‘We’re going to sell a million copies,’ and I’d never heard anyone say that before.”

The sales rep was wrong. It sold six million copies in the United States alone and has been translated into 15 languages.

- Advertisement -

“I was really disappointed by the whole South Korea hoax [about cloned human embryos],” Karp continues, “because I would really love to clone Laura. I loved every minute of working with her. She’s a Seabiscuit story herself: an underdog author, coming from nowhere and becoming a true champion.”

The book’s reviews were the stuff of every author’s dreams: “An arresting debut,” Newsweek. “A flawless trip,” the New York Times. “Astounding,” Salon.com. Seabiscuit went on to be named one of the best books of 2001 by the country’s most prestigious newspapers and magazines and was made into a movie that won seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.

All that, and she’s got looks—she’s a pretty blonde who was asked by Pond’s, the face cream company, to model for them. In person, she appears even younger, softer and more apt to break into a laugh than she does in photos. Throw in a dream relationship with her equally handsome fiance, who’s just as smart and funny as she is, and it’s enough to make anyone envy Laura Hillenbrand.

Except we haven’t gotten to the albatross part of the story yet.

It was March 22, 1987. They were three students driving the back roads of Ohio, returning to Kenyon College from spring break. Laura sat in the front seat, a crumpled bag from a fast-food restaurant by her feet. Her boyfriend, Borden, was in the back; her best friend, Linc, at the wheel. She was thinking about her junior year abroad at the University of Edinburgh.

Sponsored
Face of the Week

Then, from the side of the road, a deer nearly crashed into the car. Laura was the only one who saw it.

“I was about to speak when an intense wave of nausea surged through me,” Laura wrote in an article that appeared in the July 7, 2003, issue of the New Yorker. “The smell from the bag on the floor was suddenly sickening. I wrapped my arms over my stomach and slid down in my seat. By the time we reached campus, half an hour later, I was doubled over, burning hot, and racked with chills.”

So began her near 20-year medical odyssey through a hell that started with a diagnosis of food poisoning, continued through a series of misdiagnoses—including puberty, bulimia and mental illness—and ended with what may be a life sentence of the debilitating and misleadingly named disease, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

“The name is ridiculous,” Laura says. “Fatigue is to this disease, as a match is to a nuclear bomb.”

One of the more confounding aspects of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is that its victims can look good. Great, even. Laura would turn heads on the street, if she had the strength to walk down it. It’s easy to see why the people at Pond’s face cream wanted her as a model. She’s 38, yet her skin still has the pillowy softness of a teenager. There’s no sickroom pallor about her. No dark circles, no ashy complexion.

- Advertisement -

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people respond to my explanations of my illness with the phrase, ‘You look fine,’ always accompanied by the pinched lips and raised brows of skepticism. I love not having to wear my illness in my outward appearance, but it certainly made things difficult in my early years with it, back when people still questioned its existence.”

One of the few clues to her illness is how still she sits on her brown leather sofa. She makes few, if any, hand or head gestures. Her eyes remain fixed forward, toward a speaker and the bookcase beyond. It makes sense because, through her eyes, the room is always wobbly. She doesn’t want to shake it further.

“My life was overhauled completely on March 20, 1987,” she says. “Everything changed, every atom changed.”

Since that horrible Sunday night 19 years ago, there have been long periods when she didn’t have the strength to turn over, let alone get out of bed. She’s seen layers of her skin fall off in sheets because she couldn’t take a shower for months. There have been great bouts of nausea and vertigo that sent the room and everything around her roiling. The dizziness even invaded her dreams, giving her nightmares of plane crashes and out-of-control roller-coaster rides.

“I had two solid years without a minute’s respite,” she says.

She lost so much weight, that she had trouble sleeping on her side because her hip, knee and shoulder bones poked her. Her hair began to fall out. She stopped getting her period. Her temperature spiked to 101 every 12 hours, she had bleeding sores in her throat, as well as trench mouth, an infection of the gums. And this was just the start of her symptoms.

If you think Seabiscuit, the depression-era saga of a crooked-legged little horse that beat War Admiral, the Goliath of the track, is dramatic, you should read “A Sudden Illness—How My Life Changed,” Laura’s New Yorker piece that won the National Magazine Award. (Read the story here.)

“It was by far the most difficult thing I have ever had to write, but I am glad that I did it. It’s curious how necessary it seems to be to verbalize experiences like that.” She wrote that in an e-mail, because most of the time she’s too sick to have visitors, and asked to continue the interviews for this story via the Internet.

Getting to talk to her in person at her modest Northwest D.C. row house took several tries. It was dependent on her having a good day, which is a healthy person’s bad day. She’s been dizzy for 19 years; she carries around a hot water bottle to soothe her nausea and aching stomach; and she wears a cowboy hat inside her house because the light is too bright. On her best days, she still must lie down for two to three hours after her morning shower to recoup from the exertion.

For the four years—1996-2000—that she researched and wrote Seabiscuit, she did little else. She stocked her office on the second floor of her house with cereal, bowls and a refrigerator so she wouldn’t have to walk down the stairs to prepare meals. She arranged her research books in a semicircle around her chair so she wouldn’t have to reach for them. If she was too weak to lift the books, she wrote. If she was too dizzy to write, she interviewed—always on the telephone.

“I like telephone interviews,” she says. “The nonessentials disappear. The biggest thing that disappears is you not being there. I do interviews in a pair of boxer shorts and my feet in the refrigerator because I have a fever, and I can pace around because I’m nauseous.”

Then there were the times she was too dizzy to talk. So she closed her eyes and went back to writing.

“When I’m writing I’m not here,” she says. “I disappear. I write because I love to write. Very often I lose track of my body and [then] realize I’ve gone too far.”

Vertigo and light sensitivity prevent her from seeing movies in theaters, even the opening of “Seabiscuit.” Gary Ross, the film’s director, set up a screen in her living room to preview it. Two weeks later, she attended a screening at the White House, but had to leave in the middle because she was dizzy.

“I waited in another room with Tobey Maguire and Gary Ross,” Laura says. “When the picture ended, we rejoined the moviegoers. The president had tears in his eyes.”

Digital Partners

Enter our essay contest