A Stitch of Time
The Year a Brain Injury Changed My Language and Life
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“Readers will be compelled by this illuminating debut memoir…a captivating” (Kirkus Reviews) account of one woman’s journey to regain her language and identity after a brain aneurysm steals her ability to communicate.
Lauren Marks was twenty-seven, touring a show in Scotland with her friends, when an aneurysm ruptured in her brain and left her fighting for her life. She woke up in a hospital with serious deficiencies to her reading, speaking, and writing abilities, and an unfamiliar diagnosis: aphasia. This would be shocking news for anyone, but Lauren was a voracious reader, an actress, director, and at the time of the event, pursuing her PhD. At any other period of her life, this diagnosis would have been a devastating blow. But she woke up…different. The way she perceived her environment and herself had profoundly changed, her entire identity seemed crafted around a language she could no longer access. She returned to her childhood home to recover, grappling with a muted inner monologue and fractured sense of self.
Soon after, Lauren began a journal, to chronicle her year following the rupture. A Stitch of Time is the remarkable result, an Oliver Sacks–like case study of a brain slowly piecing itself back together, featuring clinical research about aphasia and linguistics, interwoven with Lauren’s narrative and actual journal entries that marked her progress. Alternating between fascination and frustration, she relearns and re-experiences many of the things we take for granted—reading a book, understanding idioms, even sharing a “first kiss”—and begins to reconcile “The Girl I Used to Be” with “The Girl I Am Now.” For fans of Brain on Fire and My Stroke of Insight, the deeply personal and powerful A Stitch of Time is an “engrossing” (Publishers Weekly) journey of self-discovery, resilience, and hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
On a trip to Scotland in 2007, Marks, who was then 27, suffered a brain aneurysm that left her unable comprehend the written word and made it difficult for her to communicate verbally. In this engrossing memoir, she takes readers on a journey of the ever-fascinating mind and her own long road to recovery. Through her journal entries and notes, she describes what it's like to come back from debilitating brain injury. She explores how we understand language and why it makes up so much of one's sense of self. The story is broken into four parts, with markers for each month of her first year of recovery. Marks gives an inside account of a brain in the act of healing including all the ups, downs, and complications and also supplies useful information for those suffering from aphasia, including a detailed list of books and studies by others. Marks provides a story of hope.
