I began reading Ross Douthat’s The Deep Places on a bright afternoon, sitting on my couch and trying to keep my dog on his designated cushion, away from the crisp book jacket. Thirty minutes later, I was horizontal and crying, my dog draped over me like a weighted security blanket. This is not my usual reaction to the first chapter of a memoir. But it didn’t feel like reading a memoir; it felt like reading my own life from five years ago, when I began my own struggle with a chronic illness.

Douthat has lived with the maddeningly mysterious Lyme disease for several years. The Deep Places focuses primarily on his years of trying to cure himself by whatever means necessary, but it begins with Douthat’s life situation just before the tick bite that would infect him. We meet him as a political writer with a growing family about to move to a farmhouse in the charming Connecticut countryside. He’s young, healthy, intelligent, and financially secure. Every horror story needs a sunny introduction, an unsuspecting character cheerfully escaping to a remote location.

This beginning isn’t simply a plot device, though. It’s a reminder that chronic illness doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Ross Douthat is not Lyme disease, but a person who must live with Lyme disease. That’s a lot more interesting, complicated, and tragic.

Throughout the book, Douthat weaves together his own personal experience and the history and science of Lyme disease itself. He and his disease are intertwined, and the prose reflects that. His career as a journalist comes in handy when describing the history of Lyme disease. These informative chapters are genuinely interesting, even for those who don’t have any experience with Lyme disease. They are not an encyclopedia entry on Lyme but a story about the people plagued by it for decades. He is far from the only one who has suffered. Douthat wants his readers to know that as he shares the disease’s origin tale and widens the focus to include anecdotes from anonymous posters on Lyme community websites.

After reading this history, it seems impossible that a disease that has infected and disabled so many people should still have such insufficient treatments and unreliable tests. How can doctors know so little and shrug off patients when they say that their debilitating pain persists despite taking their prescribed antibiotics? Well, what usually keeps important things at a standstill? Politics.

Generally speaking, doctors are divided into two camps regarding Lyme—the medical establishment and the weirdos. Douthat calls one of the doctors he saw “The Reassurer” and another “The Maverick,” two embodied examples of the different mindsets. The Reassurer was confident that Douthat would eventually get better with the “right” pills. When he didn’t, doctors in the Reassurer’s camp decided that the problem wasn’t Lyme but rather the patient, especially since he hadn’t tested positive for Lyme (on a test that misses many cases). Anyone with a chronic illness can identify with Douthat’s frustration and despair in the face of such doctors. On the other hand, The Maverick had seen plenty of patients’ symptoms persist despite the usual antibiotics and was willing to push boundaries and look into other forms of treatment, even if his colleagues would laugh at him. He listened to his patients and believed them when they described their symptoms despite taking their prescriptions. Yes, some doctors in The Maverick’s camp lean a bit too far into the conspiracy theorist role when they are shunned by the medical establishment, but many of them could contribute much more to the search for a cure if bureaucracy didn’t push them to the margins. As we have all seen during the pandemic, and as Douthat explains in his chapter on COVID-19, politics can easily get in the way of our compassion for those who are physically suffering.