WHEN FORCE MEETS FATE

Former bodybuilder Hill details his experiences with trauma and debilitating chronic illness in his debut memoir.

In the summer of 2009, the author was a healthy college student with an all-consuming love of fitness and an ambition to become an award-winning bodybuilder with his own TV show. Within five years, he would become bedridden and mute, his immune system wracked by a little-understood disease known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, more commonly called chronic fatigue syndrome. Suddenly and inexplicably robbed of his physical abilities and plans for the future, Hill desperately sought treatment, and in these pages, he tells of facing a medical establishment that largely refused to recognize the seriousness of his ailment. He pursued expensive specialists and experimental treatments despite symptoms—including near-constant pain, fatigue, nausea, and brain fog—that made it nearly impossible for him to work or maintain a steady income. In vivid descriptions and detailed conversations (reconstructed from memory and recordings), Hill recounts the year leading up to the onset of his illness and the subsequent ups and downs that he experienced while attempting to return to his old way of life. He tells of a harrowing car accident and the resulting PTSD that hid the severity of his early symptoms, the many dismissive health professionals he encountered, and failed attempts at intimacy as he tried to hide the extent of his illness. Throughout, he effectively explores his struggle with his self-image and his despair at being unable to exercise, which was his greatest passion. Readers will note that Hill doesn’t shy away from unflattering moments or the unhealthy ways in which he processed his grief. Most of all, though, his memoir serves to amplify the ways in which disabled people are neglected by the American health system.

A sobering account of a life profoundly changed by illness.