The Rise (and Occasional Dips Into Despair!) of Jenny Lawson In her best-selling memoirs, her eclectic, taxidermy-filled San Antonio bookstore, and her unvarnished tweets, the author makes light of her darkest times—and helps her readers make light of theirs. Anyone who has read Jenny Lawson’s work knows that the 47-year-old writer suffers from rheumatoid arthritis. Once, it made her finger swell up like a Ball Park hot dog. Another time, her ankle got so big that it looked as if she were wearing a “single nude leg-warmer stuffed with apples.” Often, flare-ups leave her bedridden or send her rushing to the emergency room; she has joked that she wishes the condition had a sexier name, like “the Midnight Death” or “Impending Vampirism.” It is a painful, incurable autoimmune disorder that affects everything from her shoe size (it fluctuates) to the way she experiences rain (her symptoms worsen). It is also the reason an in-person interview during the eleventh month of a deadly pandemic was completely out of the question.