An Interview With Laura Hillenbrand

An Interview with Laura Hillenbrand, the author of "Seabiscuit," and who suffers a life-altering illness.

*How did the illness affect your ability to write this book? Were there long periods of time when you could neither do research nor write? Did you get discouraged at times? What kept you going?

Writing this book was immensely important to me, but my illness made it hard. I had to accept that there would be a large physical price to pay for undertaking this project, and that I would have to pare away the rest of my life to save my strength  for what I wanted to do. For the four years that I researched and wrote this book, I did virtually nothing else. I devoted everything I had to it. I had my office set up so that there was a refrigerator, cereal boxes, bowls, spoons, and a giant jug of water right by my desk, allowing me to keep on working without wasting energy on fixing meals. I stacked research books in a semicircle on the floor around my chair so I wouldn’t have to get up to get them. I couldn’t travel to my sources, but found ways around this by making maximum use of the Library of Congress’ interlibrary loan service, the Internet, my fax machine, email and, of course, my telephone. For the most part, my body held together. I worked whenever I had strength, sometimes at odd hours, and I often worked until completely exhausted, and dizzy. There were days when it was almost impossible to move, but I usually found something I still had the strength to do. If I was too dizzy to write, I did interviews. If I was too weak to sift through books, I sat still and wrote. Sometimes I worked while in bed, lying on my back and scribbling on a pad with my eyes closed. Though it was hard to do this, there was never a point at which I became discouraged. These subjects were just too captivating for me to ever consider abandoning the project. The price I paid was steep. Within hours of turning in the manuscript, my health collapsed completely. The vertigo returned in force, and I was unable to read or write at all for several months. I also became markedly weaker and was rendered almost entirely homebound again. Well over a year later, I still haven’t completely recovered.

But it was worth it.

As difficult as the illness made the writing and research process, I think I also  have it to thank for spurring me into the project. Being sick has truncated my life dramatically, drastically narrowing the possibilities for me. For fifteen years, I  have had very little contact with the world. The illness has left me very few avenues for achievement, or for connecting with people. Writing is my salvation, the one little area of my life where I can still reach out into the world and create something that will remain after I am gone. It enables me to define myself as a writer instead of a sick person. Because of this, I felt so immensely powerful motivating me to write this book, and writing it as well as I could.