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EULA BISS

SEPTEMBER 29, 2014

Eula Biss, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Notes from No Man’s Land,

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"I saw myself as writing for a certain kind of optimism": In... http://latenightlibrary.org/eula-biss/

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turns her focus to a cultural and personalexamination of vaccination for her latest book, OnImmunity: An Inoculation (Graywolf Press).Biss took the time to share her thoughts with LateNight Interview about the writing process, thecomplex politics and cultural differencessurrounding immunization, and topics she mightbe interested in exploring in the future.

NICHOLE L. REBER: At what point in yourresearch and writing about a subject do youdetermine you have a book?

EULA BISS: Usually fairly late in the process. TheBalloonists began as notes for the “real” book Ithought I was writing at the time, and I hadwritten most of it before I began to think of it as abook in its own right. I had written about twothirds of the essays in Notes from No Man’sLand before I saw the potential for them tobecome a collection of essays about race. And Iinitially thought On Immunity would be a muchshorter essay. As the work unfolded, I quicklyunderstood that it would need to be longer than Ihad anticipated. But I was still surprised, when Ifinished, by how long of an essay it turned out tobe. It’s a short book, but it’s the longestcontinuous work I’ve ever written.

NR: You dug up some fantastic research onvaccinating newborns against Hep B, stating,

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“Like human papillomavirus and a number ofother viruses, hep B is a carcinogen, and it ismost likely to cause cancer in people whocontract it when they are young.” Thisreminded me of certain Republican politicianson the national stage who disagreed withvaccinating young women against HPV. Didyour research lead you to a sense of thegeneral public’s stance on the vaccineagainst HPV?

EB: I don’t think there is one stance on HPVshared by the general public. That’s part of whythe HPV discussion is so difficult and confusing.Many parents have already vaccinated theirchildren against HPV, but there is also fairlywidespread reluctance to follow the HPVvaccination recommendations. I can think of atleast five different mothers I’ve spoken with whohave five different reasons for delaying or refusingthe vaccine. Some people don’t like the idea ofvaccinating children before they are sexuallyactive, though this is when the vaccine is likely tobe most effective. Some people don’t think thevaccine is worthwhile, despite evidence thatvaccinating every 12 year-old girl in the UnitedStates could prevent about 1,300 deaths everyyear. Some people are afraid of the potential sideeffects of the vaccine, and these fears are stokedby unsubstantiated or exaggerated reports of sideeffects – one of my neighbors, for instance, wasreluctant to vaccinate her son because anotherneighbor of ours had told her that she had heard


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that it made girls in Australia infertile. Thatconcern was new to me, so I looked into it andfound that the origin of that fear was a singleindividual – a girl with unexplained infertilitywhose doctor had forwarded her case for furtherstudy. For some people, (and this might includethe Republicans you mention, as well as some ofthe Democrats I know), the actual efficacy or sideeffects of the vaccine are irrelevant because thevaccine has become emblematic of theencroachment of the state on the rights of theindividual and refusing the vaccine is a way toassert one’s individual rights or express one’sopposition to the government.

NR: In On Immunity you broach the subjectof allergies, leading the reader to the conceptof the “hygiene hypothesis.” The hypothesissuggests, “it was possible to be too clean andtoo free of disease.” I find cleanlinessappealing but that does not mean I don’tsuffer cognitive dissonance over it. I find thebottle of anti-bacterial hand wipes at theentrance to the supermarket, the post office,and elsewhere to be disturbing. However, Iadmit to being taken aback when a Britishman I met in Peru said upon meeting me,“Ah, the country that loves its hygiene.”Considering the seeming growth of allergies,especially among children, I wondered whyyou didn’t go into more detail aboutallergies.


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EB: Allergies are an enormous subject, worthy oftheir own book — a colleague of mine has alreadysuggested a sequel! My exploration of immunitydemanded that I write about allergies, particularlythe hygiene hypothesis, which is sometimesmisconstrued as a reason not to vaccinate, but theform of On Immunity limited how far I couldventure into the subject. This book, which makesfrequent forays into related subjects butconsistently circles back to its central concern, didnot allow me extended tangents. And that isprobably for the best, as almost every subject Itouched strikes me as worthy of an extendedtangent – the use of DDT to control malaria inAfrica, the murders of Lady Health Workers inPakistan, the politics of smallpox, the nuances ofinfluenza, the intricacies of toxicology, themysteries of risk assessment, the legacy ofpaternalism, etc. This book is written in thirtyshort sections, each of which could – if this was adifferent book – be expanded considerably. Butthat would make for a huge, sprawling book, and Iwouldn’t be the right writer for it.

I drew some inspiration for OnImmunity from Candide by Voltaire, which is alsowritten in thirty short sections. I was interestedin Candide in part because Voltaire was writingagainst a certain kind of optimism, and I sawmyself as writing for a certain kind ofoptimism. Candide is a bawdy, fast-paced tour ofworld history that ranges from the Lisbonearthquake and the Inquisition to the Jesuits in


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Buenos Aires and back to Paris and thenConstantinople. One could say that slavery in theAmericas deserved more than a few sentencesin Candide, but that would be missing the point.

NR: The concept of “fading immunity” andthe susceptibility of a vaccinated person whois surrounded by those carrying a disease tobe vulnerable to vaccine failure, particularlyintrigued me. “We are protected not so muchby our own skin, but by what is beyond it.The boundaries between our bodies begin todissolve there,” you wrote. “Those of us whodraw on collective immunity owe our healthto our neighbors.” Can you elucidate us withan example of fading immunity?


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EB: Our current pertussis vaccine, the acellularpertussis vaccine, produces fewer fevers and sideeffects than the whole-cell pertussis vaccine that itreplaced in the 1990s, but it may also produce animmunity that fades more quickly. (All immunityagainst pertussis tends to fade with time —neither natural infection with pertussis norvaccination can be relied on to produce lifelongimmunity.) People who were vaccinated as infantsmay no longer be immune to pertussis as olderchildren or when they themselves becomeparents. Pertussis is most dangerous fornewborns, but fading immunity is significantbecause adult caregivers and siblings are thepeople most likely to transmit pertussis to a childwho is too young to be vaccinated. There isevidence that fading immunity, along with vaccinerefusal, contributed to the 2010 pertussis epidemicin California that killed ten infants.

Fading immunity, or the tendency of the immunityproduced by some vaccines to fade over time, isjust one reason why a vaccinated person who issurrounded by unvaccinated people could bevulnerable to disease – another reason is vaccinefailure, in which the individual’s immune systemdoes not mount a robust enough response to the


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vaccine to produce immunity. Some vaccines havehigher rates of failure than others, but in all casesit is the individual’s immune system, not thevaccine, that produces the antibodies necessaryfor lasting immunity. High percentages ofunvaccinated people who create reservoirs fordisease are dangerous not just for vaccinatedpeople with fading immunity or vaccine failure, butalso for people with immune systems that havebeen compromised by AIDS or many types ofcancer.

NR: You mentioned researcher EveSedgwick’s concept of a “strong theory” inwhich a wide-ranging, reductive theorydisplaces other ways of thinking. Otherwisestated, paranoia often passes forintelligence. You also addressed this, thoughfrom a different perspective, in Notes: “Fearis accepted, even among the best-educatedpeople in this country… as a kind ofintelligence.” We might think of germs as anAmerican example in this case. Did you findyourself enacting different—or more orfewer— measures against germs while orafter writing this book?

EB: Yes, I began washing my hands much moreregularly – not, I like to think, in a paranoid way(ha!), but in a way that reflected both mynewfound respect for germs and my growingawareness of how effective hand washing can bein controlling the spread of disease. At the same


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time that I began washing my hands more often, Ialso became more dedicated to avoiding productsthat kill germs, rather than simply wash themaway. Antibacterial soaps are no more effective atreducing germs than regular soaps, and killinggerms indiscriminately can be unhealthy for bothus and our environment. My research promptedme to ask my son’s preschool to stop using handsoap that contained triclosan, an antimicrobialagent. It took some time, but they did eventuallychange soaps. In that case, I was not concernedabout the direct effects of triclosan on my son’shealth so much as I was concerned about theeffects of triclosan on the environment after it hadbeen washed down the drain. Of course, ahealthier environment is going to be better for myson in the long run.

NR: Speaking of the strong theory, I wouldso love to see your next book be aboutAmerica’s obsession with safety. Any ideaswhat your next book will be?

EB: Both fear and personal safety, which is oftenused to justify fear, have come up in my last twobooks and I certainly have more to say aboutsafety, particularly now that my son is gettingolder and even more fond of danger. (He told merecently that he really wants to go sky diving – heis five!) I don’t at all know what my next book willbe. I have a few projects in mind – a collection ofportraits of artists that interest me like Dr. Seuss,Margaret Leng Tan, and Weird Al Yankovic is one


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idea. I would like to return to writing shorteressays for a while before I tackle another book,but sometimes a book emerges from an essay, asI learned from On Immunity.

NR: Finally, if you could give three pieces ofadvice for nonfiction book-length writers,what advice would you give? What is onething you’d tell writers not to do?

EB: This is an oddly hard question for me toanswer, considering that teaching nonfictionwriting is my day job. But one of the things thatteaching has taught me is that there is very littleadvice that is applicable to every writer. And themore I learn about writing, the less confident I amgiving blanket advice. Long ago I read somethingby Anne Carson in which she mentioned that whatshe is trying to do in her writing is avoid boringherself. That is a suggestion I frequently make tomy students – try not to bore yourself.

Find a copy of On Immunity: An Inoculation onIndiebound

Eula Biss is the author of three books: OnImmunity: An Inoculation, Notes from No Man’sLand: American Essays, and The Balloonists. Herwork has been supported by a GuggenheimFellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, anNEA Literature Fellowship, and a Jaffe Writers’


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Award. She holds a B.A. in nonfiction writing fromHampshire College and a M.F.A. in nonfictionwriting from the University of Iowa. Her essayshave recently appeared in The Best AmericanNonrequired Reading and the TouchstoneAnthology of Contemporary Nonfiction as well asin The Believer, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly,Third Coast, and Harper’s. Eula Biss and JohnBresland are the Chicago-based band STETEverything.

After dozens of moves around the country and theworld, Nichole L. Reber has gone back to theMidwest, where the people are pasty, the vowelsare sharp, and the Victorians still stand.

Tags: Allergies, Candide, essays, Eula Biss, graywolfpress, Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, HPV, Immunity,late night interview, National Book Critics Circle, NicholeReber, nonfiction, Notes from No Man's Land, OnImmunity: An Inoculation, The Balloonists, Vaccination,Voltaire.


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eula biss interview for late night library

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