Brave Hearts

Like the subjects she writes about, Seabiscuit author and Bethesda native Laura Hillenbrand has triumphed over incredible hardships

By Jody Jaffe

This is the story of a horse, an albatross and two people in love.

It begins in Bethesda on 5104 Moorland Lane. The stately white Colonial that once stood there is gone; in its stead is a gaping hole dug deep into the clay to accommodate a $2 million, 10,000-square-foot house that neighbors say will have an indoor basketball court. It is one of many teardowns in the Edgemoor neighborhood. Long before the old house was razed, a little girl with long blond hair played in the back yard, with two collies named Sam and Ginger and a pet chicken named Deebee. She dreamed of horses and history and becoming a great writer.

5104 Moorland is where Laura Hillenbrand, author of the publishing phenomenon, Seabiscuit, grew up. And it was three blocks away, at the Edgemoor Club, where Laura’s destiny was set.

She doesn’t remember exactly how old she was. Nine, maybe 10. It was the late 70s. She was a swimmer on the club team: backstroke and individual medley. “We had the greatest little team around,” she says.

Practice was seven days a week in the summer, except when the skies darkened and lightning flashed. Then the coach, John Lynch, would gather up his swimmers, take them to the big clubhouse porch, and tell them stories while they waited out the storm. “This guy could really spin a yarn,” Laura remembers. “Later, I learned that the stories were actually the plots of bad horror films, but at the time I thought he was making them up as he went along, and I’d walk home giddy with terror from those stories.”

One day, during a particularly dramatic storm with thunder clapping hard around the swimmers, another man came to tell them a story.

“I didn’t know who he was then,” Laura says. Years later, when she became famous for writing Seabiscuit, the storyteller wrote her an e-mail. His name was John Fox. “He brought a gorgeous illustrated version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and he read it aloud. The storm was crashing all around us, and I sat on the floor in my wet swimsuit, curled in a towel, lost in this wondrous story. It was the first time I experienced how powerful words could be, capturing every nuance of emotion, taking me to another world.”

The tale of a man forced to carry an albatross around his neck turned out to be more than empowering; it was an ominous foreshadowing of her life. Nine years after she first heard those words, “It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three…” Laura would be burdened with an albatross of her own.

But that’s getting ahead of the story and Laura’s epiphany that stormy afternoon.

“I remember walking up Exeter Lane, thinking not only about this imaginary place I had just been, but about how it had been crafted entirely from language…I remember thinking, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ It wasn’t as if I started writing that day, but a seed was planted.”

By junior high, Laura had a drawer full of short stories she’d written. “I was blowing off homework to write,” she says.

At Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, Laura left her mark on English teacher Evanthia Lambrakopoulos, now head of B-CC’s English department. “My students ask me all the time, ‘How do you tell that somebody’s going to emerge as a writer?’ The bottom line is really voice and having control of the language that allows you to hear the person’s voice through the writing. I definitely could hear Laura’s voice through her writing.”

Lambrakopoulos also remembers where Laura sat 20-some years ago—two seats away from the door—and that she was funny, inquisitive, and wore her riding boots to class.

Laura was a horse-crazy girl. She and her older sister, Susan, scraped together $400—from babysitting, camp counseling and selling a drum set—to rescue an emaciated chestnut filly named Allspice bound for slaughter. Later, she took a job at the old Swensen’s ice cream parlor in Bethesda for $2.01 an hour to cover the vet bills. 

“She loved to run,” Laura says of Allspice. And Laura loved the track. Her father, Bernard Hillenbrand, then a lobbyist who later became a minister, once took Laura and two of three siblings to the track in Charles Town, W.Va. Laura was 5, but she still remembers a big roan by the name of Blue Barry who looked her in the eye, much like Seabiscuit looked at his future trainer Tom Smith.  Her father let her place the bet herself. Blue Barry won the race.

“That was it,” she told an interviewer from her college magazine. “I was hooked on racing.” But it wasn’t the thrill of the bet that got her.

 “I think I have placed maybe 10 bets in my whole life,” Laura says. “It was the connection to the horses and this odd world that snagged me.”

Enough so that she planned to become a jockey—even buying herself a racing saddle—until a few falls convinced her otherwise. “I’m not bold enough,” she says.

Laura’s other love was history. She’d spent her childhood going to her father’s farm, a whitewashed stone house in Sharpsburg, Md., that sits on the edge of the Antietam Battlefield. The house was built in 1810 and was used as a hospital during the Civil War.

“The farm is probably the reason why I am so enchanted by history. So much happened in that house, and when I slept there my dreams were rich with Civil War soldiers and President Lincoln and the poor slaves who built the house. I used to walk the fields as a child fantasizing about being a Union soldier, and ride my horse around pretending to be cavalry.”

The three loves in Laura’s life—horses, history and words—would eventually grow together to produce Seabiscuit, the underdog book about an underdog horse that, against all conventional wisdom about sports books in general and racing stories in particular, pushed its way to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list before a single ad appeared. Between hardcover and paperback sales, Seabiscuit held the No. 1 spot for 42 weeks and stayed on the list for more than 120 weeks. 

“It was the best manuscript that has ever been submitted to me,” says Jonathan Karp, her editor at Random House, who now works at Warner Books. “It was an extraordinarily rich human portrait that went beyond the Seabiscuit horse-racing story to encapsulate something far more historically powerful. I wasn’t the only one who had this reaction. Everyone at Random House who read the manuscript fell in love with it. I remember in a sales conference one of our reps stood up and said, ‘We’re going to sell a million copies,’ and I’d never heard anyone say that before.”

The sales rep was wrong. It sold 6 million copies in the United States alone and has been translated into 15 languages.

“I was really disappointed by the whole South Korea hoax [about cloned human embryos],” Karp continues, “because I would really love to clone Laura. I loved every minute of working with her. She’s a Seabiscuit story herself: an underdog author, coming from nowhere and becoming a true champion.”

The book’s reviews were the stuff of every author’s dreams: “An arresting debut,” Newsweek. “A flawless trip,” the New York Times. “Astounding,” Salon.com. Seabiscuit went on to be named one of the best books of 2001 by the country’s most prestigious newspapers and magazines and was made into a movie that won seven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.

All that, and she’s got looks—she’s a pretty blonde who was asked by Pond’s, the face cream company, to model for them. In person, she appears even younger, softer and more apt to break into a laugh than she does in photos. Throw in a dream relationship with her equally handsome fiance, who’s just as smart and funny as she is, and it’s enough to make anyone envy Laura Hillenbrand.  

Except we haven’t gotten to the albatross part of the story yet.

It was March 22, 1987. They were three students driving the back roads of Ohio, returning to Kenyon College from spring break. Laura sat in the front seat, a crumpled bag from a fast-food restaurant by her feet. Her boyfriend, Borden, was in the back; her bes t friend, Linc, at the wheel. She was thinking about her junior year abroad at the University of Edinburgh.

Then, from the side of the road, a deer nearly crashed into the car. Laura was the only one who saw it.

 “I was about to speak when an intense wave of nausea surged through me,” Laura wrote in an article that appeared in the July 7, 2003, issue of the New Yorker. “The smell from the bag on the floor was suddenly sickening. I wrapped my arms over my stomach and slid down in my seat. By the time we reached campus, half an hour later, I was doubled over, burning hot, and racked with chills.”

So began her near 20-year medical odyssey through a hell that started with a diagnosis of food poisoning, continued through a series of misdiagnoses—including puberty, bulimia and mental illness—and ended with what may be a life sentence of the debilitating and misleadingly named disease, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

“The name is ridiculous,” Laura says. “Fatigue is to this disease, as a match is to a nuclear bomb.”

One of the more confounding aspects of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is that its victims can look good. Great, even. Laura would turn heads on the street, if she had the strength to walk down it. It’s easy to see why the people at Pond’s face cream wanted her as a model. She’s 38, yet her skin still has the pillowy softness of a teenager. There’s no sickroom pallor about her. No dark circles, no ashy complexion.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people respond to my explanations of my illness with the phrase, ‘You look fine,’ always accompanied by the pinched lips and raised brows of skepticism. I love not having to wear my illness in my outward appearance, but it certainly made things difficult in my early years with it, back when people still questioned its existence.”

One of the few clues to her illness is how still she sits on her brown leather sofa. She makes few, if any, hand or head gestures. Her eyes remain fixed forward, toward a speaker and the bookcase beyond. It makes sense because, through her eyes, the room is always wobbly. She doesn’t want to shake it further. 

“My life was overhauled completely on March 20, 1987,” she says. “Everything changed, every atom changed.”

Since that horrible Sunday night 19 years ago, there have been long periods when she didn’t have the strength to turn over, let alone get out of bed. She’s seen layers of her skin fall off in sheets because she couldn’t take a shower for months. There have been great bouts of nausea and vertigo that sent the room and everything around her roiling. The dizziness even invaded her dreams, giving her nightmares of plane crashes and out-of-control roller-coaster rides.

“I had two solid years without a minute’s respite,” she says.

She lost so much weight, that she had trouble sleeping on her side because her hip, knee and shoulder bones poked her. Her hair began to fall out. She stopped getting her period. Her temperature spiked to 101 every 12 hours, she had bleeding sores in her throat, as well as trench mouth, an infection of the gums. And this was just the start of her symptoms.

If you think Seabiscuit, the depression-era saga of a crooked-legged little horse that beat War Admiral, the Goliath of the track, is dramatic, you should read “A Sudden Illness—How My Life Changed,” Laura’s New Yorker piece that won the National Magazine Award. (The story is available on the Web at www.cfids-cab.org/MESA/Hillenbrand.html.)

“It was by far the most difficult thing I have ever had to write, but I am glad that I did it. It’s curious how necessary it seems to be to verbalize experiences like that.” She wrote that in an e-mail, because most of the time she’s too sick to have visitors, and asked to continue the interviews for this story via the Internet. 

Getting to talk to her in person at her modest Northwest D.C. row house took several tries. It was dependent on her having a good day, which is a healthy person’s bad day. She’s been dizzy for 19 years; she carries around a hot water bottle to soothe her nausea and aching stomach; and she wears a cowboy hat inside her house because the light is too bright. On her best days, she still must lie down for two to three hours after her morning shower to recoup from the exertion.

For the four years—1996-2000—that she researched and wrote Seabiscuit, she did little else. She stocked her office on the second floor of her house with cereal, bowls and a refrigerator so she wouldn’t have to walk down the stairs to prepare meals. She arranged her research books in a semicircle around her chair so she wouldn’t have to reach for them. If she was too weak to lift the books, she wrote. If she was too dizzy to write, she interviewed—always on the telephone.

“I like telephone interviews,” she says. “The nonessentials disappear. The biggest thing that disappears is you not being there. I do interviews in a pair of boxer shorts and my feet in the refrigerator because I have a fever, and I can pace around because I’m nauseous.” 

Then there were the times she was too dizzy to talk. So she closed her eyes and went back to writing.

 “When I’m writing I’m not here,” she says. “I disappear. I write because I love to write. Very often I lose track of my body and [then] realize I’ve gone too far.”

Vertigo and light sensitivity prevent her from seeing movies in theaters, even the opening of “Seabiscuit.” Gary Ross, the film’s director, set up a screen in her living room to preview it. Two weeks later, she attended a screening at the White House, but had to leave in the middle because she was dizzy.

 “I waited in another room with Tobey Maguire and Gary Ross,” Laura says. “When the picture ended, we rejoined the moviegoers. The president had tears in his eyes.”

Through it all, Laura never complained.

Says her editor, Jonathan Karp: “Like a lot of athletes, she knew how to play in pain and kept it to herself. Not only didn’t she complain, she was the epitome of ‘sunniness.’ If I hadn’t known she had CFS, I would never have suspected it.”

Her agent, Tina Bennett, calls Laura heroic. “I don’t know anyone who has struggled with the kind of adversity that Laura has. Hers is a particularly grueling challenge because there is no letup, no relief…If there is any silver lining…it is that her inner life is correspondingly richer: Her imagination is incredibly vivid, and her empathy for her characters, profound. 

“I also think that adversity may have something to do with the unusual clarity and focus of her work. It goes beyond mere narrative or writerly gifts; it’s a kind of existential credibility, a current of unusual power.” 

Now that you’ve heard about the horse and the albatross, it’s time to hear about the two people in love.

 “I’d be dead without Borden.”

Yes, it’s the same Borden who was sitting in the back seat of Linc’s old Mercedes, the same boyfriend she met at Craig’s Deli in the middle of Kenyon’s Gothic campus.

“Sept. 6, 1986,” she announces brightly, like a school kid reciting the day Columbus discovered America. That was the day they met. “We’ve not married so we celebrate that as our anniversary.

“I was known as a deli rat. I was in there sucking down coffee…It was one o’clock in the afternoon, a sunny day. I was wearing a yellow dress. I was very tan from a summer trip to France. I have kept that dress…I remember having my face in a book, hearing the door open and having the strongest urge to raise my head.”    

In walked Borden Flanagan, a 20-year-old senior from Seattle. He was wearing a white T-shirt with “The Smiths” written on it. As he walked by, she called him over.

“I thought he was cute and I cared about the Smiths.”

 Laura was a fan of the ’80s British indie rock band, but if the young man, whom she’s described as gentle and handsome with wavy black hair, came in wearing a Monkees shirt, she’d have still found a way to start up a conversation.

They remember their first meeting differently.

She remembers he was charming and articulate.

“When he walked into the deli he had the inverted expression of someone who is struggling with an idea that fascinates and perplexes him, and who is so absorbed in it that he isn’t really seeing what’s in front of him. He was working on a paper, and hadn’t broken his focus on it for hours. So when we first spoke, what came out was Hegel and Marx. That sailed over my head, but the longer we spoke, the more I was impressed with his emotional subtlety. He was someone who felt things hard, who considered the world, and who wanted very much to understand himself and the ways people thought and acted. He also knew how to use language so beautifully.

“With him, I felt like I was home. There was a tremendous physical magnetism there also. He was radiantly handsome.”

He remembers being a pontificating bore.

“I’m really embarrassed about our first conversation,” he recalls. Borden, a political philosophy professor at American University, is sitting at a table in a Starbucks near their row house. Laura is home interviewing someone for her next book—a biography of the Olympic runner and World War II POW Louis Zamperini—and he doesn’t want to disturb her. His black hair is now flecked with gray and cropped close. “I just started nattering on about Hegel and Marx. I couldn’t shut up about it. She acted interested and then she invited me to a party the next weekend. One thing led to another…”   

And in Laura’s words, “We have been inseparable since we met.”

They’d been dating just six months when she fell sick. Too ill to leave her dorm room, Laura dropped out of college and moved back to her mother’s house at 5104 Moorland Lane. That summer, Borden, who’d just graduated from Kenyon, got a job as an associate editor at the National Interest, a foreign policy journal in Washington, and moved into the white Colonial to take care of Laura. Together, they made plans for when she would be healthy again.

“For the first months of the illness,” Laura writes in an e-mail, “I thought as young people do; I had plans for my life without disease. My hopes and my fears were always in conflict, but the hopeful part of me built an imaginary future. I was very into cycling just before I got sick, and I recall cutting out an ad for a new bike and hanging on to it in those months, looking at it from bed, seeing myself riding it. Whatever I imagined for myself, Borden was always a part of it.”

But things only got worse. By September, her blood pressure dropped to 70/50 and the doctors were telling her it was all in her head. A year later, in the fall of 1987, she emptied a bottle of Valium on her bed and considered taking all the pills. Then she thought about Borden.

“I don’t have words to express how wrenching that time was. I was desperately ill and growing sicker every day. I was very unsure if I would live through it. Worse was how bereft I felt. People I should have been able to count on simply vanished, or were actively hostile. The bottom fell out of my life. Borden was the only thing I could grab on to.”     

Finally a diagnosis came. Dr. John G. Bartlett, the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, told her the other doctors were wrong. She did have a disease. It was called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. That was the good news. The bad news was it had no treatment.

The doctor told her some patients get better on their own. And Laura did, to a point. By the fall of 1988, she was feeling well enough to move to Chicago while Borden did graduate work in political philosophy at the University of Chicago. She wasn’t well enough for an outside job, but she could write. 

“You write what you know, and I knew racing. I had been in love with the track since childhood, had read everything I could find on racing history, and as a teenager, even papered my bedroom walls with Andy Beyer’s Washington Post racing columns. Susan and I used to take the Greyhound bus to the track every weekend. We never once placed a bet. We just loved the atmosphere, the exhilaration of the competition, and the beauty of the horses. I loved riding out on the bus with the retirees. The race track is such an odd place, full of such an immense variety of people, and it’s a world predicated on the embrace of risk. That made it so captivating to me. It was something of a second home for me.”

A video she’d watched about the 1988 Kentucky Derby lead her to write an article about the dangers of too many horses in a racing field.  She sent it off to Turf Flash, an obscure horse-racing magazine. That led to a job, $50 a story. The only assignments she accepted were the ones she could research and write from her bed. That led to assignments from Equus magazine, based in Gaithersburg. Through it all, she had to guard her health carefully, doling out her energy—even for the most mundane tasks like getting the mail—with miserly caution. Anything—and nothing—could send her back to bed for weeks.

“No matter how well you’re doing, it can evaporate in a second,” says Borden.

And it did: in the summer of 1991. Borden was on break from the University of Chicago and they were in Bethesda visiting Laura’s mother, Elizabeth Hillenbrand, a journalist turned psychologist. Laura wanted to see the Saratoga race track in upstate New York. Car trips were very difficult for her and she knew the 10-hour ride might be trouble. But she was tired of living as an invalid.

The trip proved disastrous. They stopped halfway, at a friend’s house in New Jersey, with Laura racked by alternating chills and sweats.

“She was shaking, her teeth were chattering. She went ashen, she looked like a corpse,” Borden says. He called a hospital. “A nurse in the emergency room said it sounded liked shock and I should get her there as soon as possible.” But the hospital was far and neither Laura nor Borden thought she could make the trip. Plus, doctors hadn’t helped her in the past. “I fed her sugar and water,” Borden recalls. And then he lay down next to her.

Laura writes this in her New Yorker piece: “I lay there and trembled, whispering I love you, I love you, I love you to Borden through clenched teeth. I’m sorry, he said.”

That night, he says, is the most scared he’s ever been. “I thought she was going to die,” he says. So did she.

When she recovered they resumed their life, once again defined by the limits and uncertainties of her illness. There were times when he almost gave up.

“It seemed endless,” he says, “like our life together would mean endless misery. A few times I wondered if I should just go to escape the misery of watching her suffer.”

Why didn’t he?

“A number of things,” he says. “The first being love. And I didn’t want to leave her alone. The idea of her being by herself was horrible. I couldn’t allow her to be in that situation by herself.”

For the first 14 years, they didn’t speak of the strain the disease put on their relationship. Laura didn’t talk of her humiliation and guilt. Borden didn’t speak of his misery watching her suffer.  “She’s had enough to deal with,” Borden says, “Like I’m going to complain because she’s  sick?…Helplessness was a big issue for me. I just felt like a failure. Every day I couldn’t help her, it was another day of failure. A big project for me has been to learn to live with the fact that I had no control. I had to make my peace and realize my powerlessness. I’m tremendously angry at this disease, this invisible villain that’s ravaging Laura’s body.”

Yet he kept his thoughts to himself. As did Laura.

“It was very difficult for me to live with needing Borden to take care of me. I felt profoundly humiliated by it. I went from being someone he thought of as sexy and vital and alive and capable to someone who had lost control of her own body, and who was too weak to do even basic things for herself. He was immensely kind and caring, and never complained, but I was haunted by the fear of what he must really have felt. I knew it was a shattering experience for him to see someone he loved consumed by a disease, and I knew that he was hiding those feelings from me. The knowledge that he held that secret, and his pain from me, became as poisonous as the disease itself.”

 Borden uses the word “corrosive” and, in fact, the silence had eaten away through the foundation of their relationship.

It was the summer of 2001. He had spent the previous year planning his wedding proposal to Laura, talking to other men about how they’d proposed, working out romantic settings for the big night. He’d even bought a ring. Then she got sick again, really sick. 

“I finally had a breakdown,” he says, quietly. “I came into her office and started weeping.” 

Laura steeled herself for the worst news: that he was leaving her. She couldn’t blame him if he did. “He was miserable. I thought I’d lost him.”

 Fourteen years of grief, guilt, helplessness and sadness poured out of him, then her. They’d been afraid to talk, afraid of what their words might do.

“We love each other and we never wanted to hurt each other and that’s what got us into trouble,” Borden says.

“I did not think we could get through this,” Laura says.  

They talked through the night and through the summer about the invisible villain and its effects on them both.

“He had to learn to say, ‘Your sickness is hard for me,’ and I had to learn to live with that guilt and not internalize it. That was our low point. We have just gotten better ever since.”

People who know Borden and Laura think they’re perfect together, even her B-CC boyfriend, Ethan Brown, 38, who lives in Vermont and owns a Great Harvest Bread bakery. “It takes a very special person to have another person love them as dearly and invest so much of themselves as Borden has in Laura’s life,” Brown says. “And at the same time, of course, Borden is getting a lot out of having someone like Laura care about him. The truth is that everybody has their hurdles in life, no one’s immune to overcoming obstacles and that’s just what they’re doing. They’re in the thick of it and they’re preserving and they’re together.”

Laura once joked she wanted Borden to propose to her either dressed as a pirate or a matador. “The theme was definitely tights,” he says. He knew better; it was too serious a matter to kid about.

On June 20, 2004, Borden rented a room at the Hay-Adams Hotel. The French doors in their room opened to a view of the White House. That night, he took her to Gerard’s Place, a French restaurant on 15th Street where they ate rockfish and something chocolate for dessert.

It was a rare good day for her, one in which she wasn’t too dizzy or too weak to walk. They reveled in the momentary freedom from her disease, strolling hand in hand to the Mall to see the Folklife Festival. Then they returned to the room where Borden had arranged a surprise that didn’t involve black tights. 

“It was magical,” Borden says. “…There were strains of music in the background from the festival and there were loose rose petals around the room. There was champagne and candles by the front door.

“I went down on one knee and asked her to marry me.” They both cried as she said “Yes.”

“It was the best day of my life,” says Laura.

No wedding date has been set. Their lives are still defined by her illness. She’s waiting till she feels better. “It would be poor form for the bride not to show up for her wedding, don’t you think?”

Jody Jaffe is the author of Thief of Words and Shenandoah Summer.