Ryan Prior—The Long Haul: Solving The Puzzle of the Pandemic’s Long Haulers and How They Are Changing Healthcare Forever

THE LONG HAUL:
SOLVING THE PUZZLE OF THE PANDEMIC’S LONG HAULERS
AND HOW THEY ARE CHANGING HEALTHCARE FOREVER
Ryan Prior
Post Hill Press (Simon and Schuster), November 15, 2022, $28.00
ISBN-13, hardcover: 9781637581414; ISBN ebook: 9781637581421
ASIN: B0BFRXHNDP

Prior reports:

For the past 15 years–since high school–I’ve lived with a post-viral chronic illness. For the same amount of time, I’ve been driven to become an author.

During the pandemic, I was a features writer for CNN, and as the Covid-19 pandemic hit, I felt my destiny come into perfect focus. For Science Writers 2020, I was invited to moderate a panel alongside veteran magazine editor and author Pam Weintraub about how journalists should cover contested illnesses.

I told Pam I wanted to write a book about Long Covid. She connected me with Jennifer Weis, the editor of Pam’s brilliant Lyme disease book, Cure Unknown. Jennifer, who is now a literary agent, partnered with me over the next six weeks to put together my book proposal and shop it to publishers. From meeting Pam to ultimately getting a book deal offer took less than two months.

I signed my book deal while experiencing two months of disability from Long Covid. I continued covering the pandemic for CNN’s Features and Health teams through summer 2021. Then I pivoted to working on the book fulltime for the next five and a half months, racing to hit my deadline. I turned in 76,000 words February 1, 2022. By late May, the manuscript had survived a full fact check and two rounds of editing.

In writing the book, I drew on my own experiences living with chronic illness as well as my interviews with patients, advocates, scientists, and doctors. I kept up with the surge of ongoing peer-reviewed papers about Long Covid. Most of all, I relied on my own sense of mission to tell the human story at the heart of the greatest global health crisis of the 21st century. Researchers say Long Covid will have reverberations for decades to come.

This book points the way for patients themselves to drive some of the most important innovations of the future–shaping improvements in study design, raising money for research, and most importantly, using the power of their own stories to boost awareness of the challenges of living with post-viral chronic illnesses.

Contact info:

• Ryan Prior, 478-542-1463, RyanTPrior@gmail.com, https://www.ryantprior.com/, @r_prior
• Book: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Long-Haul/Ryan-Prior/9781637581414
• Publicist: Sara Stickney, 615-261-4646, sara@posthillpress.com
• Agent: Jennifer Weis, 917-696-5014, jenniferweis@rossyoon.com

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