The day before their son, Juneau, was born, Eula Biss and her husband, John Bresland, walked to the end of the pier at Rogers Beach, across the street from their apartment on Eastlake Terrace. It was the first warm day of March. Biss was in labor. They knew their lives were about to change dramatically.

So she started doing research.

Biss ended up skipping Juneau’s first hep B vaccine, not because the doctor told her to, but because she was still uncertain. But his recommendation raised some questions for her that, strangely, related to her previous book, Notes From No Man’s Land, a collection of essays about race in America. “I was back in familiar territory,” she says, “how one person uses privilege. There are large numbers of people who don’t have good access to health care. African-American children are more likely to be undervaccinated. There’s poverty. It’s a complex web. If I exercise privilege [not to vaccinate], I may not hurt Juneau, but his body serves as a vector for disease.”

It also led Biss to a particularly entertaining research tangent: vampirism, starting with Dracula. (She decided she could skip the Twilight series, but she did watch True Blood.) “There’s something different about wanting to live forever,” she says. “It’s demented. Monsters live forever. I started thinking about the problem of privileging survival above all things.”

“I thought, how would I feel if my son gave one of those kids chicken pox?” she says. “For him it’s not a terrible thing. We have good insurance and easy access to health care. It’s a different situation for another family. I didn’t want to make the decision for them.”

In On Immunity, as she did in Notes From No Man’s Land, Biss argues that most people are self-interested, placing their own needs before the general good, because of their fears. “The more vulnerable we feel,” she writes, “sadly, the more small-minded we become.” Nobody, she points out, is completely isolated from germs or from any other dangers. But are you going to spend the rest of your life avoiding taking your child in the car—or to a public beach?

By Eula Biss (Graywolf Press)

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