by Mo Daviau
Rachel Weaver’s beautiful and harrowing memoir Dizzy takes the reader on a roller coaster ride through the American medical establishment. Stricken with constant, unexplained dizziness, Weaver pursues every avenue of treatment she can find. Her narrative charts nearly two decades of false starts, misdiagnoses, and worsening symptoms, alongside other aspects of Weaver’s life—her work in the Alaskan wilderness, writing and publishing a novel, and becoming a mother to twins.
The doctors you see to treat your dizziness are, with a few important exceptions, depicted as difficult to communicate with. In a way, a medical memoir ends up being about communication and relationships as well as the illness itself, and about the power imbalance present in doctor/patient relationships. How did you approach writing about these relationships throughout your memoir?
Being a patient is hard and so is being a doctor. If the medical issue is complicated, then both doctor and patient are set up for difficulties within our healthcare system. I’m not generally a person who struggles to get along with others, but across all the years of chronic illness, I kept struggling in my interactions with clinicians. I set out to write about these relationships to try to understand why they were so difficult and often unproductive in helping me move toward diagnosis and a lessening of my symptoms.
Dizzy is also a story about seeking. Of the various non-health endeavors we see you undertake—Alaskan adventures, the journey to earning your MFA, motherhood, and publishing your debut novel—which did you feel was most urgent to write about?
Motherhood, for sure. Like most parents, I worry about whether or not I’m a good enough mom, and then in addition, about all the ways my illness has likely shaped both my sons. I needed to find the strength of that connection among all the hardships illness has created for the whole family. Writing is always the way for me to make sense of things.
Dizzy really excels in your descriptions of what the dizziness felt like. Conveying a physical sensation to readers who likely have no experience with this type of pain and disorientation is a challenge. At any point did you struggle to capture the physical sensations and their effect on your daily life? What was the hardest aspect of writing about your illness?
I set out from the beginning to write a memoir that made readers feel what it is to be chronically ill, and specifically, dizzy. I used all the crafting tools of fiction (except for the making things up part) to try to pull readers inside the experience. I think empathy and understanding is built in the reader when a story pulls the reader out of their own life experience into another. The hardest part was that I had to feel all the darkest days again in order to get it on the page.
WVU Press Connective Tissues series editor Renee Nicholson and I once discussed something related to my novel Epic and Lovely—the Good Disabled Person in literature and how the chronically ill are often portrayed as saints incapable of fault. Your memoir doesn’t do that. You write about hating the people around you who can live normal lives and about always fighting with insurance and healthcare professionals who fail you. Was it freeing to present these realities? What was it like to write honestly not just about your condition, but about the years of failure by doctors to treat it?
I definitely was not a Good Disabled Person. I did try, but good grief, this road is real and hard and messy. I tried to be as honest as possible about it in the book. My boys, who are 14 now, also like to tease me about the moments when I missed the mark for Mom of the Year. Funny stories now, but I beat myself up for years about how consumed I was with my own daily physical struggle when all I wanted was to be fully present and consumed with my sons. Writing the book freed me from some of that and replaced it with compassion for my younger self who was trying so hard.
Did you read any other illness memoirs in preparation for writing your own? If so, which ones?
So many! Some of my favorites were How To Be Sick by Toni Bernhard, Codeine Diary: True Confessions of a Reckless Hemophiliac by Tom Andrews, Ask Me About My Uterus by Abby Norman, and A Brain Wider Than the Sky by Andrew Levy.
What advice would you give to someone experiencing similar frustration and betrayal by the American healthcare system?
I’d say there are a lot of barriers, but there are also a lot of good people out there who want to help.
How are you doing now? We get a glimpse into how your health currently is at the very end, but are there any new developments that didn’t make it into the book?
My health is still pretty good. Menopause has complicated things, but overall, I’m still eating low-carb and only dealing with mild migraine symptoms one to three days per month. The study linking glucose dysregulation and chronic migraine that I was a part of published January 2026 and can be found here for anyone interested.