Stranger an Otherwise Interview

Ross Douthat

Mockingbird readers will no doubt recognize Ross Douthat from his byline at the New York Times, where he has served as a regular columnist since 2009. While Douthat was brought on to inject the paper’s editorial page with a dose of thoughtful conservatism, his point of view resists easy categorization, as do his interests. One week he’s writing about contentious midterm elections, the next, about the concept of spiritual decadence.

A devout Roman Catholic, Douthat often brings his faith to bear in his columns, exemplifying an all-too-rare combination of rigor and gentleness when it comes to religious matters. In fact, listening to him (co-)host the now sadly inactive Times podcast, “ e Argument,” constituted a masterclass in how to converse constructively with those who do not share your metaphysics. I consider him to be a model of compelling Christian witness in the public square: generous yet erudite, kindness working in concert with conviction.

Douthat has written several well-regarded books that explore our nation’s socio-political landscape, chief among them Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Highly recommended, especially for fans of Seculosity. So it came as a surprise when, in 2021, he published e Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. e book details Douthat’s long battle with the enigmatic and controversial illness known as chronic Lyme disease. It’s a harrowing (yet never self-indulgent) account of personal su ering, abounding in faith and tempered by fascinating forays into the fringes of the medical community. I was so grateful for the opportunity to speak with him about what he’s learned from dwelling in the “country of illness.”

— David Zahl, interviewer

Mockingbird

Writing a book like this is an act of bravery, even if it was not intended as such. I imagine you received not only a lot of unsolicited suggestions and diagnoses but also sympathy—maybe touching, maybe oppressive. What has it been like to write a memoir for the rst time?

Ross Douthat

e book is a little more ambiguous than I intended it to be, about just how much better I have gotten. And I’ve continued to get somewhat better since completing it. But after its release, I did get a wave of advice. I had readers who said, “Oh, you know, if you’re still completely in the woods, you should try this obscure shaman living in a cabin sixty miles northwest of Bu alo.” I’m exaggerating for e ect, but there was some of that. Mostly the reaction you get to a book like this is people asking for help, and that was a novelty for me, as a newspaper columnist. Unless you’re a foreign a airs columnist like Nick Kristof, my colleague who parachutes into dire war-torn areas, newspaper columnists are very bad at giving advice. Generally, we give advice to politicians, and it always goes terribly. So you must be in truly dire shape to ask someone like me for advice!

When I set out to write the book, among other things, I was aspiring to write the kind of book that I wish I could have read myself at the outset, something that was not just a personal story but a guide to the territory— to tell you not just where this disease came from, and why it’s controversial, but also to show the range of things that people try in order to get better. And what fundamental attitude do you need to have? What are reasonable expectations for how it’s going to go? at said, had I read this book at the outset of my illness—with its stories of spending years and years and years trying to get better—it also would have been terrifying and depressing. So that cuts both ways. I hope the advice is helpful, the map of the territory is helpful, but the reality is that a lot of people can spend a very long time trying di erent things to get better before they gure out what, if anything, works. And that’s not what anyone at the outset of an illness necessarily wants to hear. It certainly isn’t what I wanted to hear.

M

One of the metaphors that you explore in the book is this idea of the human body as a machine—of persons as technology—which, from a Christian point of view, is troublesome. But then you shift to saying you think of it as a landscape—that you’re providing a map of the territory, of both the experience and the body. Can you talk about those di erent images and the language we use for the body?

Rd

In some ways, bodies are machines, right? ey have mechanistic features: the heart pumps blood, the stomach digests food. But for the organisms that live inside your body, it is a landscape—a terrain in which they can nd places to live happily and healthily.

Illness is organisms trying to nd a nice place to reproduce themselves within the landscape of your body. eir homes need to be safe from your immune system, sort of hidden away. Your immune system can be disarmed or turned o or just defeated by them.

And so, as that last line suggests, there’s a connection between the idea of the body as terrain and territory, and the other metaphor I play with, which is treatment as a kind of military campaign. As I say in the book, I’m sort of playing o Susan Sontag’s famous Illness as Metaphor, which was written as a critique of the war metaphor in disease treatment. She was writing during the Vietnam era when it was very common to hear the idea of “you must destroy the village in order to save it,” and you have to carpet bomb and defoliate the trees in order to defeat the Viet Cong. It was very easy to see how all those things could, when applied to medicine, lead people astray. When the only thing that matters is killing disease, it doesn’t matter how much damage you do to your body along the way.

At the same time, I do think that metaphor has its uses, and is in some way inescapable when you’re trying to treat an illness. You can’t really escape the idea that your body is a territory being held by forces—blind, unthinking forces but forces all the same— and that you need to nd a way to liberate yourself through drugs, through changes to your immune system, through whatever means. But that means, it is a kind of campaign against the invader.

I appreciated the way you talked about illness as sort of like demon possession. What are the ways in which it is like possession and the ways it is not? When you’re in Mass, how do you hear the demonology of the New Testament? Do you hear it di erently now?

A little. I’m hesitant to go too far into this, because I don’t really dabble in demonology, but I’m somewhat familiar with the literature of possession. e experience of chronic illness is not the experience of a malevolent, intelligent, demon setting up shop inside your body or your consciousness. But it can feel like the disease has some kind of intelligence, right?

So in some ways, it could seem analogous to accounts of supernatural possession. While also, most of the time, remaining I think quite distinct. But certainly, there is this sense that something is inside you that is not supposed to be there. From the be- ginning that’s one of the dominant feelings I always had: that something that was inside my esh was not naturally at home there.

I was fortunate in that in my illness I didn’t have strong psychiatric manifestations, as some people do. I felt depressed at times,