New York Times editors' choice, in this vulnerable, insightful memoir, the New York Times columnist tells the story of his five-year struggle with a disease that officially doesn't exist, exploring the limits of modern medicine, the stories that we unexpectedly fall into, and the secrets that only suffering reveals. A powerful memoir about our fragile hopes in the face of chronic illness. Kate Bowler, bestselling author of Everything Happens for a Reason. In the summer of 2015, Ross Douthat was moving his family, with two young daughters and a pregnant wife, from Washington, D.c., to a sprawling farmhouse in a picturesque Connecticut town when he acquired a mysterious and devastating sickness. It left him sleepless, crippled, wracked with pain-a shell of himself. After months of seeing doctors and descending deeper into a physical inferno, he discovered that he had a disease which according to Cdc definitions does not actually exist- the chronic form of Lyme disease, a hotly contested condition that devastates the lives of tens of thousands of people but has no official recognition-and no medically approved cure. From a rural dream house that now felt like a prison, Douthat's search for help takes him off the map of official medicine, into territory where cranks and conspiracies abound and patients are forced to take control of their own treatment and experiment.