Lightning Flowers:

My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life

What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain?

That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir, Standefer tells the story of her troubled relationship to her own ICD, from her harrowing experience in the American healthcare system to her global journey to the mines and factories where the minerals in her device may have originated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to death, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.

(Read an excerpt in The New York Times here.)

Katherine E. Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving A Life (Little, Brown Spark 2020).

Lightning Flowers was a Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction. The book was also a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice/Staff Pick and the NYTBR’s Group Text Pick for November 2020. Named one of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Best Books of Fall 2020, it has been featured in People Magazine, on NPR’s Fresh Air, and on the goop podcast. Lightning Flowers was a Finalist for the 2021 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Autobiography/Memoir, selected as the Common Read 2022-2023 at Colorado College, and shortlisted for the 2018 J. Anthony Lukas Works-in-Progress Award from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.

Standefer’s previous writing was anthologized in The Best American Essays 2016 and named “notable” in BAE 2017, 2019, and 2020. She won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. In 2018, Standefer was a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at The Carey Institute for Global Good in Rensselaerville, New York, which advances deeply reported, longform nonfiction about the most pressing issues of our day. She was a Fall 2017 Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at The Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes, California, which supports writers working at the intersection of nature, human economy, and equity. A University of Arizona Writing Program Fellowship and more than $20,000 in crowdfunding supported the research in Lightning Flowers.

Standefer earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona in 2014. She has taught at Colorado College, Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA Program, in a narrative medicine pilot at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine, and in the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Arizona, as well as at top literary centers, libraries and conferences across the country, including Virginia Quarterly Review’s Conference (2018) and Northern Michigan University’s inaugural Fresh Waters, Fresh Voices Conference (2023). She delivered the keynote at the Jackson Hole Writing Conference in 2022 and the American Society of Journalists and Authors in 2021.

Originally from outside Chicago, Standefer has spent the last twenty years between Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. She earned Bachelor of Arts degrees in Sociology and English (Fiction Writing) from The Colorado College in 2007.

Standefer has published work in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The High Country News, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, New England Review, The Iowa Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Colorado Review, Cutbank, and many other literary journals, as well as the anthologies Beautiful Flesh: A Body of Essays (ed. Stephanie G’Schwind) and How We Speak to One Another: An Essay Daily Reader (ed. Ander Monson and Craig Reinbold).

Standefer lives as a digital nomad based out of northwest Wyoming. She is currently seeking representation for her second memoir, Skin Hunger: A Sexual Reckoning.

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Praise for Lightning Flowers

“An affecting, crystalline memoir.” — O Magazine

“Lightning Flowers is both a memoir and a mystery, a riveting debut book by Katherine Standefer. She faces her own heart and the technological device that keeps it beating with the sharp eye of a journalist and the dramatic pacing of a novelist. Following the supply chain from her body to conflict minerals in the Congo, we see how the world is interconnected and interrelated. Standefer is a lyrical writer who has crafted an embodied text, understanding that our survival balances on the cliff edge of our complicity and our compassion.”

—Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion: Essays of Undoing

“A sharp examination of the ways that a heart condition affected the author’s life as well as those of strangers halfway across the world… Packed with emotion and a rare, honest assessment of the value of one’s own life, this debut book is a standout. An intensely personal and brave accounting of a medical battle and the countless hidden costs of health care.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“In her stunning debut, Katherine E. Standefer reveals how a single piece of supposedly lifesaving machinery has forever implicated her in ruinous global supply chains, how entire economies of extraction have come to reside deep within her body. With great clarity and resilience, Lightning Flowers invites us to become intimate with the moral and environmental calculus of our own lives.”

—Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River 

“In Lightning Flowers, Katherine Standefer offers a full accounting of the cost of a single life, and it is nothing short of astonishing. She travels, literally, to both the brink of death and the edge of the world to discover exactly what it means to live. Her courage is palpable, on the page and in life. This book is utterly spectacular.” —Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises and What We’ve Lost is Nothing

“Lightning Flowers is a quest for an answer to the most basic human question: what is a life worth? For a young American woman, kept alive by a hunk of metal in her chest, the answer is to be found in the African mines that produce titanium, cobalt, nickel... the precious metals used to make our essential microelectronics, including heart defibrillators. No trial in this quest can be avoided: heartbreak and debt, culture shock and corporate empire, medical indifference and poverty, trauma and mortality. There is an alchemy of tender magic and brute force in Standefer's writing; Lightning Flowers transports us into the heart of Africa—and the heart of a woman forced to question our global, racialized economy even as she identifies the raw materials that give her life.”

—Ann Neumann, author of The Good Death

Because Lightning Flowers is a book about ethical supply chains, I encourage you to purchase your copy from independent bookstores, which most benefit authors, publishers, and communities.

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