Susannah Cahalan

Cahalan was born in Summit, New Jersey. Her parents divorced when she was a teenager, and both remarried. Cahalan attended Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied journalism. She began interning at the New York Post as a teenager and was hired full-time as a reporter in 2008. In 2009, she became suddenly ill with a rare autoimmune disease, anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis. She was only the 217th person in the world to be diagnosed with the disease. Cahalan made a full recovery and, after writing a first-person account of her experience for the New York Post, she turned her article into her memoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness. Cahalan's illness and luck obtaining a diagnosis instilled in her the desire to spread her story as far as possible. To this end, she worked with two other families whose children developed the disease to create a nonprofit organization called the Autoimmune Encephalitis Alliance in December of 2012. The alliance seeks to educate both patients and medical practitioners about the disease, as well as connect current patients to survivors. Cahalan married Stephen Grywalski in 2015, and the two live in Jersey City, New Jersey.