June 17, 2025
Meghan O’Rourke
Season 8, Episode 4

In this episode, Meghan O’Rourke, poet, author and editor of The Yale Review, speaks frankly about pursuing a creative and professional life with chronic illness. Joining Lauren Wetmore in conversation, and following a reading from Susan Sontag’s pivotal text “Illness as a Metaphor” (The New York Review of Books, 1979), which O’Rourke updated for the 21st century with her medical memoir The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (Riverhead Books, 2022), O’Rourke speaks to how “The way you make work might not look as consistent as a kind of late-capitalist notion of productivity insists.” She also touches on her experiences as a critic and editor of criticism, insisting that both require one to be “capable of generosity and describing love.”