With her new book, Hernández — now a journalist and associate professor at Miami University in Ohio — translates for the nation the story of the devastating disease afflicting her aunt and 300,000 other Americans. “The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease” is part memoir, part investigative thriller.

Daisy Hernández’s The Kissing Bug inhabits the interstitial space between a memoir, the story of a struggling migrant family forced to deal with a bizarre and devastating disease, and a thoughtful exploration of both the science and the socioeconomic realities of Chagas disease, also known as American trypanosomiasis.

In The Kissing Bug, Daisy Hernández recounts watching her aunt die from a little known or understood disease. Years later, Hernández set out to learn more, and entered into a harrowing medical mystery.

Through piecing together her own family's story, the history of Chagas, and the stories of other patients' illnesses, Hernández raises damning questions about which infectious diseases get attention and whom we believe to be deserving of care.

A deeply personal, unsparing analysis of how neglected diseases disproportionately affect marginalized peoples in the world’s richest country—and why they need not.

Hernández [...] blends family memoir, scientific inquiry, and journalistic exposé in this poignant study of Chagas disease, an insect-borne tropical parasitic infection that can cause lifelong heart and intestinal problems if left untreated.