THE HEADACHE
by Tom Zeller Jr.
“Required reading for anyone with a head.”
— Mary Roach, author of FUZZ and STIFF
Virtually everyone has experienced a headache—a nuisance arising from occasional stress or as payback for last night’s overindulgence. But for hundreds of millions of people, there are headaches, and then there are headaches. From relentless bouts of migraine to searing attacks of “cluster headache,” chronic head pain can upend entire seasons of life. And perhaps owing to the ordinariness of the very word “headache,” these disorders are frequently trivialized.
In "The Headache," veteran science journalist and former New York Times reporter Tom Zeller Jr. takes readers on an odyssey both intimate and panoramic, through his own decades-long struggle with cluster headaches and across the scientific landscape of a group of disorders that is — to the chagrin of sufferers — as much a curse as a cultural punchline. He visits cutting-edge clinics; interviews dozens of doctors, neurologists, and fellow headache patients; participates in clinical trials for multi-million-dollar new medicines; and reveals what is — and isn't — being done to better understand these afflictions.
Along the way, Zeller traces the longer arc of mystery around headaches, from prehistoric skull surgery to Virginia Woolf’s assertion that, in the throes of a migraine, “language runs dry,” to reveal how headaches became one of the most under-researched afflictions in medicine—and how that is slowly starting to change.
With warmth, wit, and infectious curiosity, Zeller’s search for the origins of his own headaches becomes a journey into the inner workings of the human nervous system, and an illuminating look at the nature of pain itself.
Praise for The Headache
“The Headache is smart, insightful, funny, compassionate, addictively readable, and most of all necessary. It’s about time—and every sufferer out there will agree—that we try to make sense of headaches, one of medicine’s longstanding great mysteries. Tom Zeller Jr.’s book is a pioneering illumination of both the subject and the many people it touches, offering understanding tinged with hope.”
— Deborah Blum, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of "The Poisoner's Handbook"
“For a condition that affects 50 million Americans, migraine is surprisingly poorly understood and, as a research topic, grievously underfunded. By turns personal (cluster headache! God almighty!) and journalistic, The Headache explores the mysterious nature of headache pain and, equally mysterious, the whims of federal funding and the biases that underlie the condition's neglect. Zeller writes with intelligence, compassion, equanimity, and wit. Required reading for anyone with a head."
— Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of "Stiff" and "Fuzz"
“An important, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful book.”
— Dan Fagin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Toms River"
"In this absorbing, incisive account of the history of headache disorders, Zeller captures the profound human and scientific costs of medicine's neglect of these common conditions that affect millions of people—especially women—and points the way toward a more hopeful future."
— Maya Dusenbery, author of "Doing Harm"
"Readers with migraine or cluster headaches will find themselves, as I did, comparing their own experiences with the rich material in the book, which is both a survey of the field and a great cry of pain. . . If there’s a lesson here, it’s that pain resists mastery, but understanding, however incomplete, can offer its own form of relief."
— The New Yorker
“Mr. Zeller does more than dispel the myth of malingering; he powerfully argues that justice must be done for those who . . . have been failed by a medical system that still considers headache disorders ‘a trivial choice for specialization.’ . . . What Mr. Zeller’s book offers, most powerfully, is testimony. It is not merely a headache, and it deserves our attention.”
— The Wall Street Journal
"Illuminating ... Zeller’s accounts of feuds among headache researchers and their combined wrath at what they insist is inadequate National Institutes of Health funding for their work offers a delectable blend of dish and substance"
— Slate
A sharp—and funny—account of one man’s attempt to understand why so many of us suffer head pain."
— Kirkus Reviews
"Moving. . .an eye-opening study of an all-too-common affliction."
— Publisher's Weekly
About Tom Zeller Jr.
Tom Zeller Jr. is an American journalist, former New York Times reporter and columnist, and current editor in chief of the digital science magazine Undark. In addtion to THE HEADACHE, Tom is co-editor and contributing author of the 2022 book A Tactical Guide to Science Journalism, published by Oxford University Press. He lives in western Montana.
As both a writer and newsroom leader, Tom has spent more than two decades cultivating prizewinning coverage on a diverse range of topics at the intersection of science and society, from energy policy, climate change, and environmental justice, to internet culture, technology innovation, structural poverty, and health and medicine.
In 2013, Tom was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, where he spent a year studying environmental decision-making, economics and climate policy — topics he has covered in the U.S. and abroad for The Times as well as National Geographic, Bloomberg View, Forbes, and Al Jazeera America, among other publications.
Learn more at tomzellerjr.com
Contact
Mackenzie Brady-Watson
Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency
mbw@skagency.com