Eula Biss

Thanks to a 4 hour flight, I got to dig into this excellent and insightful book today. I am a huge proponent of vaccination, and this solidified my support of vaccinating children and adults for bettering public health. I've long declared that the anti-vaxx movement has its base in white privilege, which this book definitely affirms. Further, Biss argues for vaccination as social justice, and that kind of blew my mind. When we protect our children's health, our herd immunity may protect the show more less fortunate? Whoa. show less

I've read a lot of writings by doctors, scientists, and skeptical activists about the misinformation on and public resistance to vaccines, and while many of them are excellent at laying out the facts on the subject, I often come away from them with the sense that they may, by and large, be preaching to the choir, or even taking an approach likely to alienate those most in need of their message.

But then there's this. The best description I can put forward for On Immunity is that it's a book show more about vaccines aimed at liberal humanities majors, written by one of their own. Which I think might sound like a criticism to some, but it is emphatically not. Eula Biss may be more of a poet than a scientist, but she has very thoroughly done her research here -- and not in the shallow, self-confirming sense that far too many people mean when they brag about "doing their own research" -- and she understands the facts and the science commendably well. But she also understands the emotions that real people feel when it comes to their bodies, their societies, and their children, as well as the metaphors we use to think about these things and the effects that those have on us. And she is anything but dismissive of these emotions and instincts and ways of thinking, even as she recognizes where they can fail. Through it all, she draws upon her own deeply personal experiences as a mother, sharing her profound feelings for her child and struggling with her uncertainties about what is best for him. She does all of this eloquently, thoughtfully, and movingly, and, perhaps, in a way that might reach those who find appeals to cold, hard rationality alone to be lacking something important to them.

This was originally published in 2014, and revolves, in part, around the H1N1 epidemic that was ongoing when her son was born, and which first prompted many of her fears and interests around the subjects of immunity and vaccines. But it has only become incredibly more relevant since. I'm only sorry I didn't read it a couple of years ago, so I could have gone around recommending it everywhere then. show less

Summary: A collection of American essays connected to four places the author lived, all exploring the realities of race in which we all are implicated.

Telephone poles. An essay on the introduction of (and resistance to) telephone poles on the landscape becomes an essay on lynching. It turns out that telephone poles were used to hang many black men. Biss writes of how she once thought the “arc and swoop” of phone lines a thing of beauty. Now she comments, “they do not look the same to show more me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.”

This striking comment captures a theme running through this book. Wherever we go in America, if our eyes are open, we recognize that we are implicated in our nation’s racial history. Nothing is innocent. And yet what also comes through in these essays is that Biss is not resigned to this state of affairs–repentance, a turning, is yet possible.

In her essays we follow Biss from New York to San Diego (and trips into Mexico), Iowa City, and the Rogers Park neighborhood of north Chicago. She describes locking kids into a Harlem school where she is teaching on 9/11 and how New York depleted her. In an essay sharing the title of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” she speaks of how “New York took everything I had” and like Didion, she left, but unlike Didion, she has not returned, and questions how Didion tolerated so many myths about the city.

She moves to San Diego, working for an African-American newspaper. One of her most telling essays describes Eve Johnson’s struggle with Child Protective Services to gain custody of her own grandchildren, and the repeated barriers she encounters because she is “too black” and her persistence. She notes that she never saw such stories in the New York Times.

Her next move is to Iowa City. She writes about her research into the Black company town of Buxton, no longer in existence that seemed idyllic. There was a fabric of community organizations and a strong sense of identity and self-respect among the black residents. She dares to wonder about the kind of “integration” in which Blacks are a small minority in a sea of white, as was the case with dissatisfied Black students at the University of Iowa. Is such integration really a form of assimilation rather than an affirmation of identity? She also discusses the race blindness she encounters as people decry “looting” after Katrina, but downplay thefts by students after a tornado tore through their city.

The title essay, “No Man’s Land” is set in Rogers Park, a neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, bordering Evanston. It was originally called No Man’s Land because of its location. It is also highly integrated with no racial majority, yet she writes both of the racial fears that persist among whites like her in this diverse community and of her husband’s hope that “more white people don’t move here.”

Her concluding essay is titled “All Apologies” and explores the meaning of apologies both in personal life and in our racial history. Amid this is her telling observation: “Some apologies are unspeakable. Like the one we owe our parents.”

Biss dares to explore both our implicatedness in racism, and the ambiguities of living among one another with all that history. She recognizes the ambiguity in her own family, the mixed racial ancestry that gives her a cousin able to move between white and black communities, even while on the basis of appearance, she cannot. Her essays reveal a very different version of our national character from what many would have the textbook versions to be. She sees both the beauty and value of people and cultures, and the blindness, the hardness, and the obfuscations that sustain these disparate versions of America. In her spare, reflective prose she does not offer answers but invites us to sit with her and see. show less

Those of us who identify as what is called "pro-vax"--parents who not only vaccinate their children, but who feel passionately about it--are not exactly shrinking violets. Frankly, we can't afford to be--although the vast majority of parents vaccinate their children, we do it as a matter of course for the most part, and do not feel a driving need to speak up about having done so, any more than we brag about taking our kids to the dentist. However, this silence has allowed a vocal and show more dangerous minority of no-vax, slow-vax, and anti-vax parents to dominate the conversation about immunization, to disastrous effects. We're faced now with measles outbreaks, pertussis clusters which have killed infants, even mumps outbreaks in college kids this year. Because we're so passionate, and because the other side is equally passionate, debates can devolve into shouting matches. One side braying about "science and research" while the other side spouts nonsense about a worldwide conspiracy of silence and "vaccine injuries." It's rarely productive.

Although she vaccinates her children, no one would mistake author Eula Biss as a "pro-vax" parent. And in some ways, that's exactly what this conversation needs. I consider Eula Biss the closest thing we have to our generation's Joan Didion. She shares many of the same stylistic tics, has the same careful, analytic mind, the same elegant literary sensibility, and, most markedly, the same ability to take current anxieties, identify with them, even experience them herself, and them step back and examine them like an archaeologist might examine a shard of Minoan pottery. From bloodletting and bloodsucking (pre-twentieth century medicine and Bram Stoker's Dracula, respectively) to the politics of wealth and education when it comes to the decision to vaccinate, Biss carefully weaves the fears of vaccines, and more broadly, parenthood itself with timeless themes of chaos and lack of control.

There were times I felt Eula Biss was too careful. She refers to the country's most vocal and, in my opinion, dangerous fearmongerer, Barbara Loe Fisher, as a "consumer advocate." There is an endnote that describes in more detail Fisher's role in the anti-vaccine movement, but I was disappointed to see her described in this positive manner in the body of the book. BIss's father, a doctor, at one point dismisses anti-vaxxers as idiots, and Eula Biss states unequivocally that they're not. No doubt there are those who are intelligent but misguided. But there is a deep vein of paranoid, conspiracy-mindedness that goes along with anti-vaccine ideas, and she doesn't touch this. In fact, she doesn't address the fact that the most common arguments anti-vaxxers use to sway parents from vaccinating are not based in science. In fact, they are mostly proved incorrect by science. There was a conversation about the catastrophic effect the fraudulent Wakefield study had on the vaccination rates in the U.S and the U.K., and she mentions that the IOM did an exhaustive review of the literature and found absolutely no connection between vaccines and autism. But I was concerned with the lack of acknowledgment about the scientific illiteracy question, particularly because it ties in so naturally with other dangerous belief systems that can or will cause real and lasting damage to humanity (i.e. climate change denialism).

That being said, I was enraptured as I read this book, which felt--and perhaps intentionally so--addressed to me specifically. In fact, Biss says in one of her endnotes (and be sure to read the endnotes straight through--they're an integral part of the book) that she chose to write the book to mothers, not because fathers are any less important as caregivers, but because she feels many of the anxieties about which she writes are specific to mothers. An interesting approach. A brilliant writer. show less