Eula Biss’s inoculation against misinformation about vaccines

Biss isn’t a polemicist, however. Her voice is cool, though not dispassionate; she relies on facts and reasoning and metaphors to make her points, not overheated rhetoric. Shotts, her editor, compares her to Joan Didion. At one point in the book, a doctor puts her off because he doesn’t talk to the press, and Biss is momentarily confused, even though she’s writing an article for Harper’s. “In my mind,” she writes, “I do not write for the press even if my writing is being published by the press. And if the opposite of the press is a poet, then I am both.” She didn’t conceive either On Immunity or Notes From No Man’s Land as books about current affairs; instead, they’re about questions that preoccupy her. When reporters called and asked her to comment on the situation last month in Ferguson, Missouri, she declined; she hadn’t yet made sense of it.

“She’s a writer asking questions for the long term,” says Rachel Jamison Webster, a friend and fellow professor at Northwestern who read every draft of On Immunity. “It’s a mistake to put work into too timely a moment. She’s asking questions that are likely to reverberate.”

“She’s a citizen-thinker,” says Shotts.

Biss herself is more modest: “I shoot for highly informative and aesthetically pleasing on the page. I hope I get to that place as a writer someday, like John McPhee.”

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