PIECES YOU'LL NEVER GET BACK

After a brain injury during the delivery of her son, a woman does not recognize her husband or remember having a baby.

“When my neurologist told me that the damage from the strokes had left my brain broken and scattered, when he declared matter-of-factly in his soft, earnest tones that my recovery depended upon me putting it back together as best I could, that there was nothing more the doctors or medicine could do to heal the damage, what he didn’t mention was that some of the pieces were simply gone.” Ali sensed something wrong from the moment she got pregnant. But her doctors saw only a healthy 29-year-old dealing with the anxiety of a first pregnancy. Then, moments after delivery, she went into a coma. When she came out of it five days later, she could no longer even speak English; only the Urdu that had been her first language remained. In short, nonchronological vignettes, Ali attempts to recount what happened from a medical perspective, fill in her life to that point, and chronicle how she recovered her mind and life. She includes reflections on her relationship to her Islamic faith; in the darkest hour, her parents call India to have an imam scale a holy mountain and recite the Qur’an, believed to persuade God to give a second chance. After being released, she is “nearly as helpless as my newborn”—her mother and husband are baby Ishmael’s caregivers for months. She tries to work on an autobiographical novel she has started and, though she doesn’t recognize a word she’s written, does not give up. Though Ali doesn’t name it here, that novel was Madras on Rainy Days (2004), a PEN/Hemingway finalist. Her neurologist, noting that Ali’s is the most dramatic recovery he has ever witnessed, hypothesizes that “the repetitive process of working on a story based on my personal experience” was key. This memoir seems to continue that process. After the halting pace of her recovery, an epilogue jumps ahead five years with dramatic developments the reader is not prepared for.

A unique record of what it is like to lose everything we think of as ourselves, and to painstakingly reclaim it.