“Hillenbrand’s biography of Zamperini, “Unbroken,” was released in 2010. The hardcover debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list and remained on the list for nearly four years. This week, a movie adaptation of the book, based on a script by the Coen brothers and directed by Angelina Jolie, will be released amid a flurry of early Oscar attention.”

Late one afternoon in the summer of 2004, an aviation enthusiast named Bill Darron drove down the alley behind Laura Hillenbrand’s house in Washington. He parked his car at the rear entrance and popped open the trunk. Inside were three large boxes filled with destructive implements: bomb fuses, a flare gun, a black metal device called an intervalometer and a hulking 50-pound contraption known as a Norden bombsight.

The Norden was among the most sophisticated pieces of combat equipment in World War II. Mounted inside the nose of a bomber, it could take control in midflight, steering toward an enemy target to release a payload with unprecedented accuracy. It was said that on a clear day the Norden could “drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet.” To operate it, bombardiers trained in secret for months, learning to lock its delicate cross hairs onto a target several miles away; once their training was complete, they swore an oath to protect the Norden with their lives. “It was the first secret weapon of the war,” Darron told me. “It’s the combination of a telescope, a gyroscope, an adding machine — it’s just an amazing piece of gears and optics.”

Darron hauled the boxes across Hillenbrand’s yard and up the back stairs of her home. She met him at the door and guided him into the dining room. Then Hillenbrand disappeared into another room, and Darron began to assemble the bombsight in silence. He rested the base unit on a high surface, attached the upper unit known as the football and placed a large map of Arizona on the floor a few feet away. The map was coiled around two window shades like an ancient scroll, and one shade was attached to a small motor, so that when the power came on, the map would slowly unfurl — allowing Darron to peer through the bombsight as if gazing down from an airplane in flight.

Darron had never met Hillenbrand or read any of her work. He knew that she had published a book on the racehorse Seabiscuit and that she was working on a second about the World War II bombardier Louis Zamperini, who was captured by the Japanese and held as a prisoner of war for more than two years. Other than that, he knew almost nothing about Hillenbrand herself. When she first wrote to him with aviation questions a few weeks earlier, he suggested that she visit the annual gathering of World War II buffs in Reading, Pa. “I said, ‘If you’re trying to do research on World War II, you’ve got to go there,’ ” Darron recalled. “And she wrote me back, and she said, ‘I can’t.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, you can’t?’ ”

Since 1987, Hillenbrand has been sick with chronic fatigue syndrome, which has mostly confined her indoors for the last quarter century. When she explained this to Darron, he agreed to bring the Norden from New Jersey on his next visit to Washington. Now, as he made the final calibrations, Hillenbrand returned to the room, and he offered her a brief tutorial. He showed her how to position herself above the monocular eyepiece, guide the cross hairs toward a target on the map, then lock the sight into position and wait for the twin indicators to align — until, with a satisfying click, the salvo mechanism released. Hillenbrand spent more than an hour crouched over the bombsight. Each time she came to the end of the map, Darron would reset the system to begin again.

“I spent the afternoon bombing Phoenix,” Hillenbrand told me. “I’d seen photographs of the Norden bombsight, but it’s an irregular-shaped lump of metal, and I couldn’t make any sense of it from photographs. I wanted to have as much tactile experience as I could, of what Louie did. I wanted to understand physically: What do you do when you operate a bombsight?”

As evening fell and Darron packed the Norden back into his trunk, he was still unsure what to think of Hillenbrand. He admired her commitment to detail, but he wasn’t convinced that it would be enough. The idea of writing a book about the war, the bombers, the airmen and the Pacific islands without traveling to any of the major battlefields or meeting with veterans and historians firsthand struck him as questionable at best. “Think about it,” he said. “You’re a reporter — you get in a car, you get on the subway, and you go, right? No! She’s been stuck in that house in D.C. for years.”

One day recently, I visited Hillenbrand at home to discuss the unusual way she works. We had been in touch for several months, trading pleasantries by email, and I was curious to learn more about the way her illness has shaped her creative process.

Hillenbrand’s biography of Zamperini, “Unbroken,” was released in 2010. The hardcover debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list and remained on the list for nearly four years. This week, a movie adaptation of the book, based on a script by the Coen brothers and directed by Angelina Jolie, will be released amid a flurry of early Oscar attention. The story follows Zamperini’s rise as a competitive runner in the 1930s, his induction into the United States Army Air Corps during World War II, his crash at sea and 47 days aboard a life raft, then his capture and torment by the Japanese. In other hands, the story might have proved unrelievedly grim, but Hillenbrand leavens the account with colorful anecdotes and sardonic asides: Zamperini entertaining the other men aboard his raft and joining small insurrections with his fellow prisoners.

Hillenbrand recently separated from her husband, Borden Flanagan, after 28 years as a couple, and she no longer lives in the same townhouse Darron visited in 2004. Her new home, a dozen blocks away, still had the airy, unworn feeling of a space that had been furnished but not yet lived in. There was a statue of a show horse in the foyer and a huge photograph of Zamperini leaning against a wall. We crossed an eternity of polished hardwood to fetch a slice of apple pie from the kitchen, then made our way to a set of wooden chairs parked by the bay windows.

Afternoon light streamed through the Venetian blinds, and Hillenbrand sat with perfect posture, as if held upright by strings. She is 47, with pale skin, palomino hair, an open face and probing eyes. At 5-foot-5, she has a muscular physique honed by yoga and physical therapy. One peculiarity of chronic fatigue syndrome is the degree to which it can remain invisible: A patient may be in excruciating pain without showing any outward sign of illness. There is still no simple laboratory test for the disease, nor any way to confirm its diagnosis. There is even some debate over what to call it. Many doctors and patients, including Hillenbrand, believe the words “chronic fatigue” sound trivial. They prefer the term “myalgic encephalomyelitis,” or M.E., which refers to inflammation in the brain and spine. Other doctors resist this name, questioning whether patients with the disease reliably exhibit this inflammation. Dr. Charles Shepherd, a medical adviser to the ME Association in Britain, told me that decades of mystery around the illness have only worsened the suffering of victims. “I was taught at medical school 40 years ago that this was all hysterical nonsense,” he said. “It was an illness which was either ignored, or dismissed, or regarded with extreme skepticism.”

When Hillenbrand first developed the syndrome during her sophomore year at Kenyon College, she experienced the stigma firsthand. Racked by exhaustion and too sick to attend classes, she moved back into her mother’s home in Bethesda, Md., where she soon lost touch with nearly all her friends and plunged into a combination of physical and emotional distress. A string of doctors tried to convince her that the illness wasn’t real — it was all in her imagination, they said, or maybe it was delayed puberty, or perhaps heartburn, or an eating disorder. After one examination, she asked to use the bathroom, only to discover the doctor listening at the door for signs of a bulimic purge. Even her mother wasn’t sure what to believe. “She was not supportive, and that was the hardest thing of all,” Hillenbrand told me. “When almost everyone in your world is looking down on you and condemning you for bad behavior, it’s very hard not to let that point of view envelop you, until you start to feel terrible about yourself. I just began to feel such deep shame, because I was the target of so much contempt.”

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