Sarah Ramey- The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness (Podcast)

In The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness, Sarah Ramey shares her journey through chronic illness and the medical system’s blind spots she uncovered.

This week, we’re bringing forward a powerful 2022 conversation with Sarah Ramey, author of The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness, whose novel was selected as a MomAdvice Book Club Book the year that this conversation was recorded.

This discussion remains as urgent and resonant today as when it first aired, offering an unflinching look at chronic illness, medical bias, and the stories women are too often forced to carry alone. In this episode, we also discuss the complexities of the mind-body connection, the role of privilege in accessing care, and the turning point that led Sarah toward healing through functional medicine.

Anne Patchett featured The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness in her “If You Haven’t Read This Book, It’s New to You” series for Parnassus Books. She described it as crackling, electrifying, funny, and fast-paced—a book that will outrage you and one you won’t be able to put down. I co-sign this recommendation and am proud to pull this out from our studio vault as we celebrate this month’s book club book, The Mad Wife, and the ways women’s health has been so misunderstood.

In this spoiler-filled conversation:

A deeply personal look at life before and after chronic illness: Sarah reflects on her “B.C.” life—before chronic illness—and what it means to lose, grieve, and reconstruct identity when your body no longer cooperates.
Unpacking medical gaslighting and gender bias in healthcare: From being dismissed as “mentally ill” to navigating systemic disbelief, we explore why women’s pain is so often minimized—and what must change within the medical system.
Listening to hundreds of women—and finding patterns in pain: Drawing from interviews with over 200 women, Sarah shares the common threads in their experiences, the emotional toll of carrying those stories, and how movements like #MeToo helped create space for this conversation.

BONUS BOOK LIST: Don’t miss this week’s NEW companion list with 24 Medical Drama Books to Get Your Heart Racing, available to reserve now for your best weekend ever. Patrons will receive weekly printable checklists for their next library visit!

The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness by Sarah Ramey

The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness Book Summary

The darkly funny memoir of Sarah Ramey’s years-long battle with a mysterious illness that doctors thought was all in her head—but wasn’t. A revelation and an inspiration for millions of women whose legitimate health complaints are ignored.

In her harrowing, defiant, and unforgettable memoir, Sarah Ramey recounts the decade-long saga of how a seemingly minor illness in her senior year of college turned into a prolonged and elusive condition that destroyed her health but that doctors couldn’t diagnose or treat. Worse, as they failed to cure her, they hinted that her devastating symptoms were psychological.

The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness is a memoir with a mission: to help the millions of (mostly) women who suffer from unnamed or misunderstood conditions–autoimmune illnesses, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic Lyme disease, chronic pain, and many more. Ramey’s pursuit of a diagnosis and cure for her own mysterious illness becomes a page-turning medical mystery that reveals a new understanding of today’s chronic illnesses as ecological in nature, driven by modern changes to the basic foundations of health, from the quality of our sleep, diet, and social connections to the state of our microbiomes. Her book will open eyes, change lives, and, ultimately, change medicine.

Meet Sarah Ramey

Sarah Ramey is a writer and musician (known as Wolf Larsen) living in Tucson, Arizona. She received an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and was a blogger for President Obama’s 2008 campaign.

She is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation grant for nonfiction, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation residency grant, and has been featured in The Paris Review, NPR, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, Salon, Refinery 29, LitHub, and The Washingtonian. The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness was an Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best Memoirs, it was a starred selection for Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist, and it was chosen as one of the best books of 2020 by BookPage.

Sarah has been living with serious chronic pain and illness for seventeen years, and The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness is her first book.