The disease starts with flu-like symptoms, and in Cahalan's case, violent seizures, then swiftly progresses to the point of losing the ability to speak, read, write, and even walk. The film is based on Cahalan's 2012 memoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness that chronicles her journey through medical mystery and finding her diagnosis in a rare brain disease called autoimmune encephalitis.

I was initially shocked when Walls let her story become vulnerable to the likes of Hollywood, and even more so when she wrote an article for The Los Angeles Times expressing her gratitude to the film's director and crew for working closely with her to get little details of her story right, because when I left the theater I felt as though their efforts did not do Walls and her family much justice.Ī month or so ago I watched Brain on Fire on Netflix, starring Chloe Grace Moretz as Susannah Cahalan, a 24-year-old New York Post journalist who goes from being healthy to catatonic in a month. I voiced my concerns with Hollywood's glamorization of trauma and their misrepresentation of Walls' experience with poverty. While Walls' story is remarkable the contents of the book aren't exactly lighthearted. I wrote about this topic in The Vindicator last fall, after I saw the film adaption of one of my favorite books, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, a memoir.

The line between fiction and reality is blurred in Hollywood, especially in cases of dealing with the lives of actual people and things that happened to them. More often than not, authors' voices are lost during production, their stories placed into the hands of screenwriters and producers.īut what about the memoir genre? Very few memoirs have successfully been turned into films - usually when a work of nonfiction is brought to the screen, the words 'based on a true story' appear during the opening credits. When works of fiction are turned into films, we're quick to notice the differences from page to screen, and most of the time are left dissatisfied because they didn't meet the expectations of our imaginations. You know how the saying goes: the book is always better.

The brain on fire book