By explaining her personality and mood changes in terms of how well her brain is functioning at any given time, Susannah makes the very concept of personality into a matter of body chemistry. When her family doesn't recognize Susannah's personality as her own at various points in her illness, they're actually perceiving that their memories of Susannah don't match up with the person in front of them. This leads her parents and Stephen to question who, exactly, this new person is-and whether this new person is still Susannah. These symptoms turn Susannah into a completely different person than the woman she was before she became ill. She becomes delusional and experiences intense mood swings, all of which are worsened by aural and visual hallucinations. She becomes paranoid about bedbugs and thinks that her boyfriend, Stephen, might be cheating on her. When Susannah first becomes ill, her symptoms are primarily psychotic ones. In this way, the memoir explores different modes of expressing and experiencing one's own identity or the identity of another person, as well as the ways in which questions of identity are entangled with health and the body. As Susannah changes over the course of the memoir, she and her family continually question who she is and whether she'll ever be the same as she once was, and Susannah in particular chafes when she senses that her friends and family aren't able to see who she is due to the way her illness affects her body and brain. Most difficult for Susannah, who describes herself as a proudly independent person, is that the disease also makes her entirely dependent on her caregivers in the hospital, her family, and her boyfriend. The disease temporarily changes Susannah from a driven, strong-willed, and passionate person into someone who is paranoid, angry, and mean.
Brain on Fire tells the story of 24-year-old Susannah Cahalan, a journalist at the New York Post who suddenly contracts the disease anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis.
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