Monday, June 04, 2007

Chat with Lisa Roney, Thursday!

Continuing the popular "Meet the Author" series of online chats this Thursday, June 7, 2007 at 9:00 PM EST will be a chat with an author who broke new ground when her autobiography "Sweet Invisible Body: Reflections on a Life With Diabetes" was first published in August 1999. I'm speaking of none other than Lisa Roney! As some D-Bloggers may recall, Kerri interviewed Lisa back in February. I've had the pleasure of exchanging periodic e-mails with Lisa since 2005, and Lisa is one of those people that you cannot help but bond with almost instantly! Like the others, this program will be held in the DiabetesTalkFest chatroom.

Lisa, who grew up in Tennessee, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1972 at age 11. Since her initial diagnosis, diabetes has turned her life into an ongoing balancing act. She began her book after deciding that society had denied diabetes its stature as a serious illness. As she told Kerri in February, "There were books written by the deaf, the blind, those with cancer ... but nothing about diabetes."

Lisa told The New York Times reporter "As I tried to learn to understand myself, it was natural for me to look to books and there was not much out there. All kinds of other ailments have figured in literature and cultural studies, But for some reason, diabetes was not included."

Lisa's groundbreaking autobiography "Sweet Invisible Body" was the one of the first books published during a relatively short timeframe earlier this decade regarding life with diabetes when it was reviewed by The New York Times back in 2000, as was Andie Dominick's "Needles: A Memoir of Growing Up With Diabetes". Since August 2003, Lisa has been a professor who is on a tenure track at the University of Central Florida.

Lisa has told me that since her book was first published, she has since become a convert to the pump. She adds that her pump has made life much more "normal". Although she says "It's still a pain, and there are always issues with MiniMed, but I do love the pump. I sometimes even lose track of time now, and though that's not something that most people would think of as an accomplishment, I do!"

We've enjoyed terrific programs with James Hirsch and Amy Tenderich, and this one promises to be another terrific program. Lisa has been a blog reader for quite a while, and she has expressed her optimism about meeting many of the people behind the blogs, so this promises to be a great program. Don't miss it!

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