The Body Is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human is available for pre-order!

My eco-memoir about chronic illness comes out March 2025 from Running Press

I am SO excited to announce that my memoir about ecology and chronic illness The Body is a Doorway: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human is available for pre-order on all online bookselling platforms ahead of its release in March 2025. You can find different ways to order here. This book was born in community - in conversation with you, my readers, my mycorrhizal conspirators. Thank you so much for helping me give birth to this story.

Deep thanks to Running Press and Shannon Fabricant for believing in this project. And a valley-wide thank you to my incredible agent Leslie Meredith. The book’s cover copy follows below:

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 readers 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? 

The book arrives on March 4th, 2025 and is available for pre-order on all bookselling platforms.