Eula Biss’s inoculation against misinformation about vaccines

She has a poet’s gift for compression. (Her first book, 2002’s The Balloonists, was a collection of prose poems.) If she’d used all the material she’d gathered, she told Shotts early on, On Immunity would have been an 800-page tome. Instead she sifted through and winnowed it down into 30 short sections. Some are dense, but their brevity keeps them readable. Both Shotts and Webster encouraged her to include her own feelings and experiences about being a mother trying to decide the best thing to do for her child. “It’s an intellectual book with facts and ideas,” says Webster, “but she hasn’t forgotten her heart and why we struggle with questions. We want desperately to protect the people we love.”

“I wrote the book I wanted to read when I was an expectant mother,” Biss says. Perhaps that’s the reason that, in the end, On Immunity is a forgiving book. It has to be: unless enough people band together, immunity doesn’t work.

“The way disease moves, it shows our relationships to each other,” she says. “We think of community in a limited way. The book exposed to me who is my true community, everyone who shares air, whether we know or like them or even know their name.”

 

 

              

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