"Lab Rat is quite unlike anything I have ever read before. It's capacious in scope but also captivating on the level of sentence and scene. In fact, this author has written the kind of invitation-extending and permission-giving text that other writers, including MFA students, should read. Here we have a fully realized memoir enhanced by research and imagination—or, just as true, a work of probing topical nonfiction anchored by a compellingly unique voice, narrative, and consciousness."
Julie Marie Wade
"Cory's work is tender, wry, hilarious, and heartbreaking all at the same time. Lab Rat is a trenchant study of the histories of medicine, economics, race, and sexuality that thrive by making human bodies vulnerable—both as things to be healed and as things to be used and discarded. It is also a deeply intimate meditation, sometimes confession, about Cory's desires, fears, foibles, and wishes as he submits his own vulnerable body to medical testing. But what makes this work even more powerful is the way he sutures these two narratives into a seamless body of gorgeous and compelling prose."
Michael Bibler
"Cory’s essays are a revelation. A brilliant tapestry of the history of pharmaceutical testing and intimate details of Cory’s years as a participant in research trials, these essays interrogate Big Pharma and a society addicted to being sick."
