When writer Sophie Strand was a child growing up in Woodstock, she nursed injured birds and bottle-fed abandoned baby opossums. A Chinese goose followed her everywhere, and a squirrel would steal avocados or nap on her bed.
“I found animals and plants much more trustworthy than human beings,” she says. “I am lucky to have been raised by feral academic animists—people who believe that everything is alive.”
Strand’s parents, the writers Perdita Finn and Clark Strand, moved to Woodstock in 1996. “Perdita and I were constantly researching articles and writing books as Sophie grew up, and she made good use of our vast library on subjects like ecology, deep history, high fantasy, religion, and philosophy,” Clark says.
Now 31, Sophie Strand is only able to eat a handful of foods, and every few days she receives an IV infusion of high-dose vitamins. She has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder that weakens connective tissue, along with mast cell activation syndrome, which makes her unable to tolerate most foods. Every meal is a risk. Every breath is an act of perseverance. She is, by all conventional measures, sick.
Yet it’s hard to tell. Her alabaster skin, piercing blue eyes, and copper-red hair radiate vitality. And her writing exudes a deep wisdom some might think is more typical for highly intuitive and spiritual elders.
Strand spends about a third of her day in a meditative state—out of necessity, to endure relentless pain. “The first thing I do every morning is write 500 words,” she says. “It’s hygiene. Some days I do 10,000 words and I’m super inspired. Some days I don’t. But the only way to get through a project and to complete it is to have that kind of constancy.”
Her new memoir, “The Body Is a Doorway: A Memoir: A Journey Beyond Healing, Hope, and the Human,” will be published March 4. It is not a story of triumph or overcoming. Instead, it explores what it means to live in a body that does not conform to expectations.
“Our whole culture wants us to speed up—consume more, collapse faster,” Strand says.
To mark the book’s release, Strand will speak Sunday at St. Gregory’s Church in Woodstock.
“I’m tired of the word ‘survivor’ and the personal responsibility of coming back into cultural legibility,” she writes. In “The Body Is a Doorway,” she reframes hypersensitivity—often dismissed as fragility—as a form of ecological attunement. “I noticed minute shifts in cloud formations. I could read the silver-flipping twist of leaves to predict the exact moment a storm would hit.”
After repeated rejections for being “too literary and long,” she started writing deeply personal essays during the isolation of the pandemic. Eventually her thoughtful and thorough comments on Instagram gained traction. Strand never expected to be a memoirist. She spent years writing “The Madonna Secret,” a historical fiction novel, while supporting herself as a ghostwriter.
“I had given up on ever publishing my own work,” she says. “I thought I should just give away everything for free. And when I did that, my work went viral and I got a book deal. And then I got another book deal within three months.”
She is the author of “The Flowering Wand” and “The Madonna Secret,” as well as the creator of the popular Substack “Make Me Good Soil.”
Illness as a portal
At 16, she says something in her genetic code activated. What followed was nearly a decade of medical misdiagnoses, malpractice, and systemic failure. The diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos came late, and even then, it brought no solutions—only the knowledge that her body would continue to deteriorate.
“Diagnosis isn’t necessarily illumination,” she said. “Knowledge should come through connection, not separation.”
Strand resists the standard illness narrative—the arc that bends toward healing, the resolution that ties suffering into a neat bow. Instead, she asks: What is health when you can’t get better?
“The American medical system is broken,” she tells The Overlook. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it slow-motion eugenics.”
She speaks from experience.
“I live really cleanly. I do everything ‘right,’” she says. “And still, my body betrays me.”
Her longtime friend Nora Knight has witnessed it all. The two met as students at Bard College.
“She’s someone who probably never physically feels good, but she still brings humor and levity,” Knight says. “She can be in unimaginable pain and still crack a joke.”
Strand’s book does not offer solutions, nor does it aspire to. Instead, it presents something rarer—a refusal to let illness be the full story.
“The body is not a fortress,” she says. “It’s a doorway.”
It is a passage to the more-than-human world, to the network of living things that extend beyond human comprehension.
“My suffering is not separate from the suffering of the planet,” she says. “I hope this book offers soft places to land for people who feel like they have none.”
For now, she holds her diagnoses lightly.
“I don’t know how long I have,” she says. “But I do know my ideas don’t belong to me. I have to share them while I can.”
“Ideas are like a game of hot potato—if you’re holding it at the end, you’ve lost the game. You’ve got to keep passing stuff along.”
The Golden Notebook will host an author event with Sophie Strand on March 2 at 2 p.m. at St. Gregory’s Church in Woodstock. The Overlook co-founder Jacqueline Kellachan is also co-owner of The Golden Notebook.
Noah Eckstein is the editor-in-chief of The Overlook. Send correspondence to noah@theoverlooknews.com.
