Miracle Cures

Miracle Cures is a sharp, anxious, very funny novel about fact-checking, wellness culture, hypochondria, media precarity, parasocial obsession, and the human hunger for a cure that will make life finally begin. Its narrator is Nelly Corrigan, a young freelance fact-checker at a giant Manhattan media company, working on a glossy new wellness magazine built around a famous Movie Star and her empire of “self-optimization.” Nelly’s job is to correct falsehoods, but the deeper she goes into the Magazine’s world of diets, toxins, psychics, retreats, flower essences, detoxes and miracle cures, the more she becomes exactly the kind of vulnerable reader the Magazine exists to capture.

The novel begins in April 2017, with Nelly fact-checking the debut issue. She is assigned stories about aphrodisiac foods, animal psychics, lectin-free dieting, jade eggs, bee venom therapy, detox products and other wellness claims. Her supervisor Rory, the glamorous red-haired Research Manager, trains her in the religion of fact-checking: consider the source, hedge dangerous claims, beware cherry-picking, and remember that omission can create a lie. Nelly loves this structure. Fact-checking lets her be right in public, with a red pencil as weapon.

But the Movie Star’s magazine is not like the bridal and lifestyle copy Nelly first checked. Its editors want to publish “questions,” “ancient wisdom,” and “groundbreaking ideas,” even when those ideas have little scientific support. Tabitha Pruitt, the Movie Star’s right-hand woman and the Magazine’s executive editor, treats fact-checking as obstruction. When Nelly challenges an article claiming that a lectin-free diet can cure autoimmune disease, Tabitha tells her that her job is not to decide whether the ideas are true or useful, only whether the article accurately reports what the doctor thinks. Nelly is intimidated into silence.