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"  On a recent night, Laura Hillenbrand lay in bed dreaming of somersaults in the powder-blue bedroom she shares with her husband, Borden Flanagan, in their modest \u00ADyellow row house in Upper Northwest Washington, DC. Dozing in REM sleep, the author of the acclaimed horse-racing history Seabiscuit (2001) imagined herself tucking her head to her chest, tipping forward, and letting her hips and legs pull her all the way over. A playful-seeming reverie, conjured out of the mists of an athletic childhood.  But then she didn&amp;#039;t stop turning. She couldn&amp;#039;t stop, flipping and flipping in a torment of constant motion.  Most of Hillenbrand&amp;#039;s dreams are like this now, strange, panicked scenarios cobbled together somewhere inside her head\u2014plummeting airplanes and storm-tossed ships are other recurring motifs\u2014to help her process the strange and excruciating physical sensations that she lives with more or less all the time.  Hillenbrand has chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), a cruel medical condition with an unfortunate name that fails utterly to do \u00ADjustice to an often debilitating array of so far unexplained symptoms, including muscle pain, unrelenting exhaustion, digestive problems, environmental hypersensitivity, occasional fevers, and that aforementioned vertigo. &amp;quot;Laura is on the more severe end of the spectrum,&amp;quot; says Fred Gill, MD, a noted specialist in \u00ADinfectious disease at the National Institutes of Health, who treated her for many years. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s very serious. It stops people&amp;#039;s lives.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s so frightening and hellish and disorienting,&amp;quot; Hillenbrand says, &amp;quot;and on top of that there&amp;#039;s this layer of gripping fear, because I don&amp;#039;t know what will happen next, if it will get worse.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s sitting at her dining-room table, one foot folded under her knee, looking like the picture of health, pretty and cheerful, in a black blouse, metal-rimmed glasses, and hoop earrings.  It&amp;#039;s early afternoon, her best time of day. Since she first came down with the disease in 1987, the severity of her symptoms has shifted without warning or explanation, and the ferocious relapse that began three years ago, as she was deep into the research phase of her \u00ADsecond book, seems gradually to be abating. Over the years, Hillenbrand has often gone for long stretches without so much as leaving her room, but she&amp;#039;s feeling strong enough lately to receive a visitor. Aside from Flanagan, a soft-spoken professor of \u00ADpolitical philosophy, who passes through from time to time; her new doctor, who by necessity does house calls; and one social visit a few weeks back, I&amp;#039;m the only person she&amp;#039;s seen in months.   &amp;quot;When I was really dizzy, I was almost screaming with fear because it&amp;#039;s so thoroughly disorienting, but it&amp;#039;s not too bad right now,&amp;quot; she says, smiling. &amp;quot;Things are moving in a liquid kind of way, and the floor is slanting and it looks like a really bad computer-generated image. Nothing looks real.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s only then that I realize Hillenbrand has \u00ADremained perfectly still\u2014keeping her hands folded in her lap\u2014since we sat down an hour before. Suddenly imagining how my own gestures must look to her, I try not to make any abrupt movements.  Reviewers and fans of Seabiscuit, which was dubbed &amp;quot;a model of sportswriting at its best&amp;quot; by The New York Times before going on to sell some 3 million copies and spawn an Oscar-nominated feature film, praised the book&amp;#039;s descriptive immediacy and the \u00ADauthor&amp;#039;s spooky ability to put the reader right in the saddle with jockey Red Pollard atop the squat, famously graceless horse as they thundered around the far turn in the legendary race at Santa Anita in 1940.   Only when Hillenbrand began to talk openly about her affliction did it become apparent that her astonishing prose wasn&amp;#039;t simply a stylistic choice or a literary flourish but a psychic imperative. &amp;quot;I think riding along with those jockeys, creating that sense of movement and exhilaration, might have been the product of her desire to experience that in her own life, because she was living such a constrained existence,&amp;quot; notes Jonathan Karp, the book&amp;#039;s \u00ADeditor, who is now publisher of Simon &amp;amp;amp; Schuster.  &amp;quot;It was all about motion,&amp;quot; agrees Hillenbrand, &amp;quot;all about what I can&amp;#039;t do.&amp;quot;  It was during her research for Seabiscuit, poring over reports of the horse&amp;#039;s match races in yellowing old 1930s broadsheets she&amp;#039;d found on eBay, that Hillenbrand first took note of another preoccupation of the era&amp;#039;s West Coast sports pages: the story of Louis Zamperini, an incorrigibly rebellious teenager who competed as a miler in the Berlin Olympics. Zamperini&amp;#039;s exploits, she thought, might make a good subject for her next book. Only later did she learn of the subsequent twists his life had taken: After enlisting in the Army Air Corps, he became a bombardier and was shot down over the \u00ADPacific. Somehow he swam from the wrecked plane and wound up drifting on a small life raft 2,000 miles across shark-filled waters for 47 days. Eventually, he and a fellow airman were spotted and captured by the Japanese, who interned them in a series of horrific POW camps. Fourteen months after the U.S. government declared him dead, Zamperini returned home to a hero&amp;#039;s welcome\u2014\u00ADfollowed by a traumatic, whiskey-soaked readjust\u00ADment. When Hillenbrand reached out to him, he was 87 and living in California.  Zamperini&amp;#039;s amazing tale is at the center of Unbroken, which \u00ADarrives in bookstores November 16. In it Hillenbrand demonstrates a dazzling ability\u2014one Seabiscuit only hinted at\u2014to make the tale leap off the page. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like she sees in color and the rest of us see in black and white,&amp;quot; Flanagan marvels.  &amp;quot;When I read it, I felt like I was right back there,&amp;quot; says Zamper\u00ADini, now 93. &amp;quot;She brought my buddies back to life. I \u00ADbelieve she \u00ADactually relived every moment I lived in the \u00ADprison camp.&amp;quot;  Part of the book&amp;#039;s power is attributable to Hillenbrand&amp;#039;s tenacity as a researcher, her eagerness to immerse herself in the minutiae of, say, the cockpit layout of a B-24 or the physical effects of dehydration. She scoured countless war-crime affidavits and conducted hundreds of interviews, including more than 70 with Louis himself, many while she lay in bed. &amp;quot;I loved her relentlessness,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;She has a sweet personality and a soft demeanor, and yet her \u00ADquestioning was very intense.&amp;quot;  Indeed, the sheer depth of her research allowed her to unearth visceral details Zamperini himself had forgotten or blocked out. &amp;quot;At one point I asked him, `Were your eyes hurting because of the glare off the ocean?&amp;#039; He said, `Come to think of it, yeah, we had headaches all the time.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  And this is where Hillenbrand&amp;#039;s illness actually serves her work. Compared to her own situation, the deprivations of a lost raft or the brutality of a prison camp can seem like an escape. &amp;quot;I climb into these stories because I don&amp;#039;t want to be here,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to be in this body and I don&amp;#039;t want to be in this place, so I&amp;#039;m on that raft. It takes a while to get my concentration to that level, and then I lose all track of time.&amp;quot; Which, it seems, is exactly the point.  She also developed a deep kinship with Zamperini and his \u00ADfellow POWs, much as she did with Seabiscuit\u2014all of them indomitable characters facing incredibly long odds. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t compare my experience to theirs, but something I do understand is being in a situation of ultimate desperation, or suffering to the last point of your ability to tolerate it. I can understand how bad it felt, and I can draw strength from the fact that they got through those things. What you feel more than anything else in these situations of great extremity is an experience of terrible aloneness, when you get truly desperate and hopeless, and it&amp;#039;s reassuring to see that other people have gone to those places and come back.&amp;quot;   As a child growing up in Bethesda, Maryland\u2014the daughter of a lobbyist \u00ADfather and child-psychologist mother\u2014Hillenbrand was a hard-core jock. She swam competitively, spent her weekends riding and grooming horses on her dad&amp;#039;s farm in rural Maryland, and became such an avid tennis player that when she enrolled at Ohio&amp;#039;s Kenyon College, she chose a dorm based on its proximity to the courts. She was 19 when she became ill on a road trip back to school after spring break. \u00ADFeverish, her glands and stomach swollen, she soon found herself unable to walk, much less \u00ADattend class, and so withdrew from school and returned home to Maryland. Except for Flanagan, her boyfriend, who stuck by her, Hillenbrand&amp;#039;s tight circle of college friends seemed to forget all about her, and her family offered a collective shrug.    The isolation was devastating. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like you go to another place, like you&amp;#039;re not on this planet anymore,&amp;quot; Hillenbrand says. &amp;quot;You reach a level of despair and suffering where you just don&amp;#039;t feel like the rest of the world.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;She didn&amp;#039;t get the family support she should have,&amp;quot; says Hillenbrand&amp;#039;s sister Susan Avallon, a script reader. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s one thing I still feel bad about. It took years, \u00ADunfortunately, to find out how bad it was. For a long time we just expected she&amp;#039;d get better and go back to college. Then it \u00ADbecame clear she wasn&amp;#039;t getting better.&amp;quot;  Meanwhile, a parade of doctors diagnosed her with strep throat, stress, laziness, anorexia, or depression. One told her, &amp;quot;The only thing wrong with you is an attitude problem.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I think when Laura was first sick, a lot of them just thought, What&amp;#039;s this little blond girl doing here in my office claiming illness?&amp;quot; recalls Flanagan, who moved to Washington soon after his graduation to help care for her. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a combination of the arrogance that is an occupational hazard of medicine and a certain degree of sexism.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;In the early years, a lot of very good doctors didn&amp;#039;t believe it was a syndrome at all,&amp;quot; acknowledges Gill, who over time \u00ADbecame one of Hillenbrand&amp;#039;s best friends. &amp;quot;Well-meaning people would say, `You need psychiatric care.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;  Several years later, when she was finally diagnosed with a mysterious new ailment, it was one with a name that sounded to most \u00ADpeople like a joke. &amp;quot;Jay Leno was on TV every night calling it the yuppie flu,&amp;quot; she \u00ADrecalls. &amp;quot;To think of how much suffering it&amp;#039;s caused, just that name, how many people have been alienated from their families or been unable to get disability\u2014that&amp;#039;s a source of a lot of \u00ADanguish and a lot of anger.&amp;quot;  In the intervening years, Hillenbrand has experimented with an array of treatments, including steroid hormones, daily vitamin B-12 shots, a gluten-free diet, acupuncture, and Chinese herbal \u00ADremedies. &amp;quot;They didn&amp;#039;t help,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;and in some cases made things much worse. So because of the way a seemingly small mistake can land me in bed for years, I&amp;#039;ve become very conservative. The most effective thing I&amp;#039;ve done is to learn, through trial and error, how best to manage my body\u2014eating bland, easy-to-digest food, keeping the temperature in the house low, and always stopping myself the \u00ADmoment I feel myself sliding into fatigue.&amp;quot;  When possible, she also practices yoga, not only to prevent her muscles from atrophying but to maintain her emotional balance as well. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not just the poses, but also the meditation,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;and learning and applying the philosophy behind it: \u00ADacceptance, living in the moment, focusing on being peaceful, being alive to what is beautiful and good all around me.&amp;quot;  One night in July 2003, Hillenbrand sat in a corridor of the White House, not far from the East Room, where she&amp;#039;d been \u00ADinvited for a special screening of the film adaptation of Seabiscuit. She can&amp;#039;t actually watch a bright screen, so while the film unspooled in the 40-seat family theater to an audience that included George W. and Laura Bush, as well as Steven Spielberg, \u00ADJeffrey Katzenberg, Tobey Maguire, and director Gary Ross, the author sat gazing out a \u00ADwindow onto the Rose Garden. &amp;quot;I was just letting it sink in, and I thought about the years that I was stuck in my mom&amp;#039;s house, and how the vertigo was so bad, and how I really had to think of a reason to keep going. It was a wonderful moment, realizing, That time is over. I&amp;#039;m in a different place now.&amp;quot;  Still, the success of Seabiscuit didn&amp;#039;t change Hillenbrand&amp;#039;s circumstances as much as one might expect. She purchased her first home, but it was next door\u2014and more or less identical\u2014to the one she and Flanagan had been renting for years. \u00ADFinancial security was nice; after years in which she often found herself choosing \u00ADbetween paying her rent or covering the massive phone bills she racked up doing all those interviews, she no longer had to worry about money. But since there&amp;#039;s still no treatment for CFS, once she was diagnosed, her medical bills became quite low. The usual luxuries (travel, clothes, fancy restaurants) hold no appeal, either. The disease complicates digestion, so Hillenbrand&amp;#039;s diet is spare and unchanging: Wheetabix and skim milk for breakfast, toast with almond butter and blueberry spread for lunch, and baked chicken with baby-food vegetables for dinner. She spends hours at a time on a balcony just off her \u00ADoffice, gazing out at the cemetery behind the house and watching the comings and goings of a variety of animals. &amp;quot;I never move, so they&amp;#039;ve decided I&amp;#039;m not dangerous,&amp;quot; she says, smiling as she relates recent developments involving the Carolina wren Petey, the cardinals Stanley and Gladys, and the squirrels Barnacle, Nosy, and Tum-tum. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re my buddies.&amp;quot;   One of her tricks for staving off depression has been to forswear daytime TV; at night, though, favorites include 30 Rock, So You Think You Can Dance?, and shows about astrophysics on the Science Channel. Her sister Susan mentions another coping mechanism: &amp;quot;When Laura feels really sad, often she will get on the Internet and find a horse that&amp;#039;s destined for slaughter and find it a home. To me that says a lot about who she is.&amp;quot; She also teamed up with actor Gary Sinise to cofound a charity, Operation \u00ADInternational Children, that distributes books and school supplies overseas.  Hillenbrand&amp;#039;s only real splurge since what Jonathan Karp \u00ADdescribes as publishing&amp;#039;s equivalent of &amp;quot;winning the lottery&amp;quot;: a chairlift that snakes upstairs from the living room, which she rarely uses because riding it can set off her vertigo as easily as walking downstairs can.  The more significant change Seabiscuit wrought involved her sense of self. &amp;quot;Learning I could reach out into the world from here, that was really beautiful,&amp;quot; she says the following afternoon, sitting in her office, a small space where she&amp;#039;s stowed all the necessary provisions (\u00ADtoaster, mini-fridge, electric kettle, hair dryer) so she can conserve every ounce of available \u00ADenergy for work. &amp;quot;It also brought about a great change in the way I thought about myself. For a long time I felt stuck at 19 forever, stuck in the way people saw me. It was truly shattering. The book changed my relationship with the world. You can&amp;#039;t say I&amp;#039;m lazy.&amp;quot;  The experience also made it easier, when she suffered her most recent relapse, to keep fighting. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m so impressed with her,&amp;quot; \u00ADFlanagan says, beaming. &amp;quot;I mean, in the \u00ADbeginning, she was sick to the point where it wasn&amp;#039;t clear how long she could keep breathing. It was \u00ADreally awful. She was just flat in bed. And as soon as she could sit at the desk, she&amp;#039;d read. But she still couldn&amp;#039;t lift her arms to the keyboard. She wrote this book under such extraordinary circumstances. She finished the very first draft \u00ADbasically only being able to move from the bedroom to the desk.&amp;quot;  Watching Flanagan and Hillenbrand \u00ADinteract together, it seems clear that since first \u00ADfalling for each other in the campus deli back in 1986 (they bonded over a shared love for the Smiths), they have forged an \u00ADextraordinary \u00ADrelationship, united in a weary\u00ADing \u00ADstruggle and leavened with large doses of ironic humor. I ask Flanagan how he&amp;#039;s \u00ADmanaged to handle the pressure.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m just so awesome,&amp;quot; he says jovially.  &amp;quot;He tells me that every day,&amp;quot; Hillenbrand jokes.  Flanagan adds, more seriously, &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t tell you how demoralizing it is to be helpless when somebody you love is suffering. It&amp;#039;s tremendously emasculating because the biggest problem you want to solve, you can&amp;#039;t, so every day is an experience of failure.&amp;quot;  It helps, Flanagan says, that even at her sickest, Hillenbrand can be wickedly funny. &amp;quot;One time I remember she had this infection and this awful fever, going up and up and up,&amp;quot; he recalls. &amp;quot;And it was 104, I think, and you said, `When I hit 107, sell.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; They both laugh, a bit darkly.  Despite that levity and the tremendous accomplishment of completing Unbroken, which like her debut seems destined for best-seller status and critical acclaim, Hillenbrand still lives a sort of twilight existence, shadowed at all times by fear of the future. Indeed, a few weeks after our interview, I e-mail her with a question. She \u00ADreplies a day later: &amp;quot;In the last few days, my health has taken a sudden, very sharp downturn, and I&amp;#039;m back to being trapped upstairs. I&amp;#039;m scared to death that I&amp;#039;m sliding into another relapse. If you happen upon a magic wand, wave it my way.&amp;quot;   Notes Louis Zamperini, &amp;quot;I suffered for a short period of time\u2014her suffering is for life.&amp;quot;  Susan echoes the idea: &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s still on the raft.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m dealing with things that frighten me and with moments that are really miserable,&amp;quot; Hillenbrand said when we met. &amp;quot;But overall I feel happy in a way that can&amp;#039;t be shaken. A great deal of that is him&amp;quot;\u2014she flicked a smile toward Flanagan. &amp;quot;And a great deal is the writing, because it&amp;#039;s the one way in which what I am in my essence can be realized. Everything else has been \u00ADcompromised, but I found a way to be who I really am on the page in a way I can&amp;#039;t be in my living-life, and that has made me really, deeply happy.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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