The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir

A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human

De: Sophie Strand

Narrado por: Sophie Strand

In this lyrical, radically expansive self-portrait, celebrated poet, author, and lecturer Sophie Strand explores—with searing insight and honesty—the intersecting spaces of her own chronic illness, the complex ecology of a changing world, and the very nature of the stories we tell ourselves.

At age sixteen Sophie Strand—bright, agile, fearless—is suddenly beset by unexplained, debilitating illness while on a family trip abroad. Her once vibrant life becomes a tangled miasma of medication, specialists, anaphylaxis, and seemingly never-ending attempts to explain what has gone so terribly wrong. And, for many years thereafter, Sophie's life becomes subsumed with ideas not of "health," but of explanation, and the narrative of how and why she became sick. But slowly, through both profound fatigue with the medical industrial complex and a deeply entwined relationship with the natural world, she comes to another, more fundamental understanding of what has happened to her body. What if sickness is not a separation from the body? What if health is not quite so easy to see? What if physical pain leaves us no choice but to return to our bodies, the pinpricks and lightning of illness stitching us back into a physical presence our society has taught us to ignore?

In a work both expansively tender and shockingly frank, Sophie Strand offers listeners a window onto her own winding journey through the maze of chronic illness—a web not unlike those created by the mycorrizhal fungi whose networks she begins to see as a metaphor for the profound connections between all species and the earth. Grounded deeply in the mountains of the Hudson Valley, each moment of this far-reaching narrative snakes its way through the multi-layered ecology of the land around us, from the stunningly powerful pollen of a phlox plant to the unexpected beauty and wisdom of the woodchuck.

The Body Is a Doorway dives into the murky waters of sickness and trauma, as well as the resonant challenges and joys of friendship, young adulthood, first love, and fertility. Throughout, in precise, sparkling language, it explores questions both personal and universal: Is there healing beyond the human? Beyond the hope for a cure or a happy ending? Is there something wilder and more symbiotic beyond narrow ideas of well-being?

©2025 Sophie Strand (P)2025 Running Press Adult

A transcendent treatment of illness and its relationship to the natural world.

I loved Sophie’s honesty and her flowing story of her life with an incurable illness. But, one that has brought her not only pain but immense creativity and joy. A must listen!

Best book I have ever listened to

This is the best book I have ever listened to, or read. I’m going to immediately listen to it again. I sobbed so much of the time listening to it. It is absolutely beautiful.

The interesting of the human body and natural world.

Sophie Strand is a brilliant young woman, and this book is yet another manifestation of that.

Raw and honest account of chronic illness

I’ve followed Sophie for a long time and already knew a good bit of her story. This delves deeper into the pain, suffering, abandonment, and loneliness of her and countless others of us who are facing similar situations. Even with a tremendous amount of support from family, friends, and fans one still has secrets, feels lonely, and the lies, the lies, the lies that come out of the mouths of humans are too much to bear. Turning to the more-than-humans is the medicine. Sophie’s story is layered. It must be heard over and over. Fan fiction notes should be written in the margins of the physical book. It’s not going to change the humans of the systems and institutions that got her or any of us here. But tell it to the orcas, the plants, the trees, the octopuses, the birds who actually are showing up for the fight. We have allies who might have tricks but never lie. It’s not over until it’s over.