By Laura Hillenbrand
Louis Zamperini is, among other things, one of the toughest
people to ever walk the earth. He knows
this and wrote about his travails in Devil at my Heels, published in
1953 and re-edited and re-published in 2003.
When contacted by Laura Hillenbrand who was seeking to write his
biography, he felt like he had already told the story and didn’t think there
was anything left to say. Just the same,
he graciously sat through more than 70 interviews while she patiently asked him
questions, reviewed volumes of documents she had unearthed, and double-checked
the veracity of witness accounts. Unbroken:
A World War II Story of
Survival, Resilience, and Redemption is a masterful piece of
research; beautifully written and lovingly shared.
In his 95-plus years in this life Zamperini has been a
juvenile delinquent, vagabond, high school track star, Olympic athlete, World
War II bombardier, castaway, prisoner of war, husband, and inspirational
speaker. It is difficult to read
Hillenbrand’s book and not imagine some invisible hand at work, keeping him
from the brink of ruin or disaster or death until he found God in the person of
Billy Graham. He was born with a nose
for trouble and the winged feet of Hermes, both of which would serve him well
throughout a life of pain and hardship.
Zamperini had another quality, hidden away inside himself, which
inspired Hillenbrand to be his biographer:
he had endured the worst of man-made, soul- and body-killing hells but
somehow managed to preserve the tiniest kernel of himself. Long after the hell of war was over and Louis
Zamperini was on the precipice of self-destruction, he rediscovered that essential
piece of himself and nursed it back to life.
Hillenbrand is best known for her biography of Seabiscuit,
the legendary thoroughbred racehorse of the Depression era. Like Unbroken, Seabiscuit is
meticulously researched and a wonderfully told tale. Reading the notes on sources in the back of
these two books reveals the depth to which the author goes to learn about her
subjects. She tracks down every witness,
living or dead, and finds every document which references them. While the
amount of work that Hillenbrand puts into her books is staggering, her true
gift is in knitting everything together to create personal histories that take
readers deep into the lives of her subjects.
In the case of Louis Zamperini, Hillenbrand found information about him
that he never knew existed, including diaries of fellow prisoners-of-war, and which
touched him deeply. Typically, biographers
and journalists spend days and weeks on the road searching out information and
conducting interviews. Hillenbrand was
unable to do that. She had to talk her sources
into boxing up and shipping irreplaceable documents, photographs, artifacts,
etc., to the prison that is her life. Hillenbrand
suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a mysterious illness for which there is
no known cause nor cure, and rarely leaves her house, let alone her bed.
There really is no way to appreciate what it is like to live
with CFS other than to imagine having advanced rheumatoid arthritis, the flu, and
a killer hangover at the same time, for weeks and months on end. On good days, Hillenbrand can take a shower
standing up, ride in a car, or take a very short walk. Sadly, the good days are few and far
between. Until she was diagnosed,
several doctors dismissed her as being a hypochondriac, despite raging fevers,
swollen lymph nodes, and strep throat that would not respond to antibiotics. Before collapsing at 19 years of age, Hillenbrand
was a hard working and athletic college student. She had dreams of becoming a history
professor, but her illness forced her to drop out of Kenyon College and retreat
to her mother’s home in the Washington, DC, suburbs. That could have been the end of her story,
but she wasn’t willing to give up on living a useful life.
This fighting spirit is what kept her college boyfriend of
five months, Borden Flanagan, from leaving.
Not only did he remain committed during the months leading up to
Hillenbrand’s diagnosis, he wanted to marry her and hoped one day to have
children. She, too, wished to marry but
kept waiting for her illness to go into remission. It never did; but no matter how sick she was,
Hillenbrand found a way to keep working.
First it was writing for a horseracing magazine which never paid her what she
was owed but did lead to better assignments, such as writing for Equus.
It was while reading about Seabiscuit for a piece for American Heritage that Hillenbrand
became inspired to dig deeper into the story behind the legendary racehorse and
the people who believed in him. It took
Hillenbrand ten years to write Seabiscuit as her disease ebbed and
flowed, giving her brief periods of productivity in between relapses. Even on her worst days, however, she tried to
accomplish something. When she submitted
the manuscript for publication, she neglected to mention that she too sick to
get out of bed most days.
After enduring years of condescension from the medical
community, Hillenbrand eventually found a doctor who was able to help her
manage her symptoms to a degree and this enabled her to continue striving. In an
essay she wrote for The New Yorker
magazine, Hillenbrand describes how she was able to do the research and writing
involved in Seabiscuit. It was a
matter of conserving and managing her strength and that required tremendous
strategic thinking. CFS limited the
amount of energy Hillenbrand could expend on a given day, so she had to monitor
herself carefully to assess what she could accomplish. From her bedroom, she arranged for the
Library of Congress to lend materials to her local public library. When the materials arrived, she would go to
the library and pore over them, taking detailed notes until the room began
spinning. Back in her room, if she
couldn’t read, she would conduct interviews over the telephone, if she couldn’t
talk, she would send emails. Her research
was so good and her questions so intriguing, that no one was put off by her
reclusiveness. Louis Zamperini did not
find out that his biographer was bedridden until he read an article about her
after Unbroken was published. He
sent her one of his Purple Hearts.
It was shortly after Seabiscuit was published that
Flanagan confronted his feelings about spending his life with an invalid with
whom he could never have children. Hillenbrand’s
success meant that she was no longer completely dependent on Flanagan, and the
idea of being free tempted him. When he
finally worked up the courage to share his ambivalence with Hillenbrand, the
two of them discovered strengths in each other that enabled them to forge a
stronger and deeper relationship than either had thought possible. He stayed and the two eventually married.
To Chronic Fatigue Syndrome sufferers, Laura Hillenbrand is
both hero and role model. They write to
her imploring her to do for CFS what she has done for Seabiscuit and Louis
Zamperini. What she has said is that she
uses her subjects as a means of escaping the disease that changed her from
being an active, vital person to a ghostly invalid. It would take a biographer as skilled as
Hillenbrand to bring her inner life to light and determine the degree to which
fighting the disease makes her strong or her strength keeps the disease from
winning. Either way, Laura Hillenbrand
is a champion.
Copyright 2012 Teresa Friedlander, all rights reserved
