Dizzy: A Memoir

by Rachel Weaver

In her early thirties, Rachel Weaver woke up dizzy and unable to function. She spent the next ten years seeing more than thirty medical practitioners before receiving a diagnosis, and then another eight years before finding relief from her condition. Dizzy is a medical mystery and a cautionary tale about our broken healthcare system. It is a story about learning to live with life's uncertainty, persevering in the pursuit of answers, and striving to find joy.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Health, Medical

324 pages, Paperback

Published February 10, 2026

About the author

Rachel Weaver is the author of the novel Point of Direction, which Oprah Magazine named a Top Ten Book to Pick Up Now. Point of Direction was chosen by the American Booksellers Association as a Top Ten Debut for Spring 2014, by IndieBound as an Indie Next List Pick, by Yoga Journal as one of their Top Five Suggested Summer Reads and won the 2015 Willa Cather Award for Fiction.

Prior to earning her MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University, Rachel worked for the Forest Service in Alaska studying bears, raptors and songbirds. She is on faculty at Wilkes University’s low-residency MFA program, and at Lighthouse Writers Workshop where she won the Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence in 2018. She is the owner of Sandstone Editing where she works with authors one on one to help them get their books ready for publication. Rachel’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Sun Magazine, Gettysburg Review, Blue Mesa Review, Southeast Review, Medicine and Meaning, River Teeth, The Healing Muse, Alaska Women Speak and Fly Fishing New England.

Rachel’s medical memoir, Dizzy, is forthcoming in February 2026 with West Virginia University Press as a part of the Connective Tissues Series. She also has a novel, The Last Run, forthcoming in June 2026 by Lake Union. For more information visit https://rachelweaver.net/land. Point of Direction is her first novel.

Reviews

[Marika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author Rachel Weaver has written a memoir about her 18 year struggle with near constant dizziness. Her dizziness began as she was entering Graduate School causing her to dropout and which followed her like a black cloud affecting every aspect of her life. Rachel is a very intelligent woman who went from one medical expert to another to try to find an answer/solution to her problem. She went to neurologists, to acupuncturists, to chiropractors and even to those who she knew rationally wouldn't be able to help her (healing frequencies etc) but still the dizziness held on.
What she never lost was hope; hope that there was a solution and that she would find it despite the well meaning physicians who were ineffective.
What was the cause of her dizziness? Read her memoir to find out and to learn about the power of hope.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I could not put this exceptional memoir down and stayed up past my bedtime to finish it. Rachel is a gifted storyteller and her rich memoir is so much more than just a medical memoir or illness narrative. It’s also about grief and loss, and the healing powers of nature and art to help us weather our suffering. Before Rachel got sick, she was an avid outdoors woman and bad-ass field biologist working in southwest Alaska, and she writes beautifully about the wilds of Alaska. I dare anyone to read this book and not be moved by Rachel’s perseverance to create art and start a family while coping with a debilitating illness.