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A review by bookclaire4eva
I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia by Su Meck
2.0
After a freak accident with a ceiling fan (of all things), a young mother forgets everything.
What a strange way to suffer a traumatic brain injury. A ceiling fan to the head. Nothing sinister, nothing powerful, just a ceiling fan with loose connections that finally let go. No fractured skull, no huge pools of blood, no grisly gashes in the scalp. Just a small cut and the loss of all memories prior to the event.
It's almost impossible to imagine. One day, you're a young parent, the next you wake up and you don't remember having been a child, gotten married, or giving birth to those children. Su says she had two birthdays: the usual day of birth and the day of the incident.
This near impossibility of imagination is a large part of why Su had such a long and difficult road to recovery (or at least as much recovery as was possible). There was no real physical damage to her brain, and since the doctors she consulted couldn't find a reason for her amnesia, they wrote it of as psychological rather than physiological. How much does that suck? So she never really got the help she needed. For years she struggled, relying far too much (although she had little choice) on her children to function. Not only had she lost her memories prior to the accident, but for years afterwards, she had little ability to make new memories. Her short-term memory was almost nonexistent. Her struggles remind me of Left Neglected by Lisa Genova (although that's a work of fiction). What's truly amazing is that decades after the incident, she graduated from a local college.
While all of the above is interesting, I found the book less than amazing. I think the stilted writing and telling rather than showing is a result of her brain injury, but I still couldn't get past it. She really can't do much better, and her co-writer and editors decided to leave her voice as-is. While this editorial choice makes sense, it made it difficult for me to really get into Su's story. It just seemed bizarre, rather than the heart-wrenching and sympathetic that I'm sure was part of the whole point.
Leave It
What a strange way to suffer a traumatic brain injury. A ceiling fan to the head. Nothing sinister, nothing powerful, just a ceiling fan with loose connections that finally let go. No fractured skull, no huge pools of blood, no grisly gashes in the scalp. Just a small cut and the loss of all memories prior to the event.
It's almost impossible to imagine. One day, you're a young parent, the next you wake up and you don't remember having been a child, gotten married, or giving birth to those children. Su says she had two birthdays: the usual day of birth and the day of the incident.
This near impossibility of imagination is a large part of why Su had such a long and difficult road to recovery (or at least as much recovery as was possible). There was no real physical damage to her brain, and since the doctors she consulted couldn't find a reason for her amnesia, they wrote it of as psychological rather than physiological. How much does that suck? So she never really got the help she needed. For years she struggled, relying far too much (although she had little choice) on her children to function. Not only had she lost her memories prior to the accident, but for years afterwards, she had little ability to make new memories. Her short-term memory was almost nonexistent. Her struggles remind me of Left Neglected by Lisa Genova (although that's a work of fiction). What's truly amazing is that decades after the incident, she graduated from a local college.
While all of the above is interesting, I found the book less than amazing. I think the stilted writing and telling rather than showing is a result of her brain injury, but I still couldn't get past it. She really can't do much better, and her co-writer and editors decided to leave her voice as-is. While this editorial choice makes sense, it made it difficult for me to really get into Su's story. It just seemed bizarre, rather than the heart-wrenching and sympathetic that I'm sure was part of the whole point.
Leave It