Enhancing an
already enthralling beginning about the surprising facts of a young woman’s
stroke at age 33, the writing in this book is what continues to beguile and
capture, elevating the work to a mesmerizing memoir of a condition and a long
recovery that changed her life, and the lives of many others as well. The
author’s sense of detail and her reference to her journals of those days,
combined with impressive research that only adds to the narrative, makes the
memoir a sensitive portrayal of the condition of stroke and its result of
making the brain and its memories a jumble. She writes of her experience not
merely as a metaphor for her own psychological condition where the stroke made a
dividing line of before and after, but also as a journey of
exploration and compassionate understanding of the fraught emotional delicacies
contained in that before and after, specifically the loss of her marriage, integrating
her childhood history of violence, a core change in personality, of becoming a
mother, discovering her body in health, and finding love anew. The book is
organized like memory—fragments of scenes that appear and reappear, information
and deep reflection salient to those fragments, and overall a sense of
artfulness in the manipulation of time as an apt way to organize a story that
threw the narrator herself out of linear time. It is an honest, heartfelt and
brave book, an absorbing read not just about the condition of stroke, but about
identity and finding self-love.
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