(Hardcover) (Paperback May 2022)
Katherine E. Standefer
Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life
(Little, Brown Spark, November 2020)
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Kirkus Best Book of 2020: Nonfiction
#1 Audible Bestseller
Featured on Oprah Magazine‘s “The Best Books of Fall 2020 – So Far”
Featured on Forbes “A roundup of the books that colleges are assigning their incoming students”
Featured on Forbes “Nine first-time female authors to read this holiday season”
Lightning Flowers weighs the life-saving potential of modern medical technology against its complicated mark on the author’s life, and against the social and environmental costs of the mining that makes such technology possible.
What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That’s the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking after being shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator for the first time.
In this intimate memoir about the way illness changes a life and the global reverberations of the American medical system, Standefer recounts the story of the rare diagnosis that upended her life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling—uninsured—into a maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots.
From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the sandy shaft of a tantalum mine in Rwanda to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated.
Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to death, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving a life.
Praise for LIGHTNING FLOWERS
“An affecting, crystalline memoir.”
–Oprah Magazine
“[A] sprawling memoir…Pick it up and you will hear a human voice…I couldn’t get enough of Standefer’s unsinkable spirit and eye for little moments of grace.”
–Elisabeth Egan, The New York Times
“Packed with emotion and a rare, honest assessment of the value of one’s own life, this debut book is a standout.”
–Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“In her stunning debut, Katherine E. Standefer reveals how a single piece of supposedly lifesaving machinery has forever implicated her in ruinous global supply chains, how entire economies of extraction have come to reside deep within her body. With great clarity and resilience, Lightning Flowers invites us to become intimate with the moral and environmental calculus of our own lives.”
—Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River
“In Lightning Flowers, Katherine E. Standefer offers a full accounting of the cost of a single life, and it is nothing short of astonishing. She travels, literally, to both the brink of death and the edge of the world to discover exactly what it means to live. Her courage is palpable, on the page and in life. This book is utterly spectacular.”
—Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises and What We’ve Lost is Nothing
“Lightning Flowers is a quest for an answer to the most basic human question: what is a life worth? For a young American woman, kept alive by a hunk of metal in her chest, the answer is to be found in the African mines that produce titanium, cobalt, nickel… the precious metals used to make our essential microelectronics, including heart defibrillators. No trial in this quest can be avoided: heartbreak and debt, culture shock and corporate empire, medical indifference and poverty, trauma and mortality. There is an alchemy of tender magic and brute force in Standefer’s writing; Lightning Flowers transports us into the heart of Africa—and the heart of a woman forced to question our global, racialized economy even as she identifies the raw materials that give her life.”
—Ann Neumann, author of The Good Death
“Lightning Flowers is both a memoir and a mystery, a riveting debut book by Katherine Standefer. She faces her own heart and the technological device that keeps it beating with the sharp eye of a journalist and the dramatic pacing of a novelist. Following the supply chain from her body to conflict minerals in the Congo, we see how the world is interconnected and interrelated. Standefer is a lyrical writer who has crafted an embodied text, understanding that our survival balances on the cliff edge of our complicity and our compassion.”
—Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion: Essays of Undoing
“Part of Standefer’s skill as a writer lies in her ability to return to the parallel between her body’s experiences and that of the land. Though this is a recurring theme, her use of language keeps the imaging from getting stale… Lightning Flowers is sublime in many ways. Standefer writes poetically and concretely of her emotional and physical experiences, while also tackling larger ethical issues.”
—Gulf Coast Magazine
Read The Psychology Today article that features LIGHTNING FLOWERS
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Meet Katherine E. Standefer on Cheapbooks
Read Taos News‘s review of LIGHTNING FLOWERS
Read an excerpt from LIGHTNING FLOWERS in The New York Times
Read The New York Times review of LIGHTNING FLOWERS
Listen to Katherine E. Standefer on NPR Fresh Air
Read Jackson Hole News & Guide‘s feature of Katherine E. Standefer and LIGHTNING FLOWERS
Read Gulf Coast Magazine‘s review of LIGHTNING FLOWERS
Read an excerpt of LIGHTNING FLOWERS on The University of Arizona’s Alumni Association
Read Katherine E. Standefer’s interview with Southwest Word Fiesta
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Katherine E. Standefer is a writer based in Tucson, Arizona. Winner of the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction, her essay “In Praise of Contempt” appears in Best American Essays 2016. Her other work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Normal School, Fourth Genre, The Iowa Review, The Colorado Review, Cutbank, The Indiana Review, Fugue, and The Rumpus, among many others. Standefer earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from the University of Arizona, where she teaches creative nonfiction.