BODY SONGS

BODY SONGS o?ers a deeply personal exploration of Long Covid and advances a fresh and provocative argument about the brain's role in both causing and healing from chronic illness. Emma Zimmerman was a young and active grad student living in Brooklyn when COVID spread around her friend group in 2022. While her friends recovered quickly, she only got sicker, experiencing symptoms that kept her bed bound most days and ba?ed her doctors.

Eventually, she was diagnosed with Long COVID and suffered for months, seeking out specialists and experimental trials and trying alternative medicine, all to little effect -a familiar story for sufferers of chronic illnesses. But here is where Zimmerman's story takes a di?erent turn: not only in that she has fully recovered but also in how she recovered. The answer, for her, finally came through the neurocircuit approacha treatment model predicated on the understanding that the brain can create and perpetuate symptoms in the body absent of any physical, structural damage to the body itself.

In BODY SONGS, Zimmerman uses the fascinating and powerful story of her own recovery as a starting point for a dive into the science of neurocircuit conditions and what we knowand don't knowabout the brain, and how our understanding and treatment of chronic conditions could be changed for the better if we learn to think di?erently about how illness arises within the complex relationship between the mind, the brain, and the body. BODY SONGS is poised to be not only the first of its kind memoir about Long COVID, but one that might shift how we all consider our bodies, minds, and medicine and, for those suffering, perhaps offer some hope.

Emma Zimmerman holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from NYU and is currently the George Bennett Fellow (Writer-in- Residence) at Phillips Exeter Academy. Her writing appears in outlets including Outside and No Tokens (forthcoming), and her 2022 Hu?post essay on Long Covid got a ton of engagement. She was the 2022 Lit Fest Nonfiction Fellow for Emerging Writers at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and won the 2021 PRISM International Creative Nonfiction Contest.