Wondering Who You Are

March 15, 2015
A wife's tale of loss and recovery. In June 2000, diagnosed with an extremely rare appendix cancer, Lea's husband chose to undergo an experimental surgery to excise cancerous growths filling his abdomen, followed by several days of hot chemotherapy. Post-surgery complications resulted in his suffering an "anoxic insult," loss of oxygen to the brain. After the siege to his body, he emerged weak, disoriented, and unable to remember anything. In her candid, unsentimental debut memoir, Lea tells the story of two survivors-her husband, Richard, and herself-as they have confronted changes in their identity, relationship, and family as a result of his trauma. She interweaves a chronicle of Richard's medical challenges with her account of a 23-year marriage that was often infused with anger: Richard's erupted in violent attacks on their young son, Lea's in rebellion against responsibilities as a wife and mother. Yearning to be wild, she turned to drink, often blacking out, sometimes for minutes; "other times, most of a night would go by and I wouldn't know what had happened." She was an alcoholic for years before she finally went to Alcoholics Anonymous; by the time of Richard's operation, the marriage had improved. As Richard's caregiver, though, anger surfaced again: she admits that she does not like "leaving the role of his lover to take on what feels like becoming his nurse, teacher, and mother." But she is "determined to become the fiercest, most virtuous caregiver anyone has ever seen." Their daughter accused Lea of controlling Richard's story by publishing her version, and sometimes her assertions are troubling: Lea writes, for example, that "Richard isn't experiencing grief for a lost self" because he is "helpless to find that former being." But readers will get little sense of what Richard truly feels, and grief seems a distinct possibility. A forthright memoir that narrates an engrossing journey of self-discovery and fierce devotion.

Starred review from July 1, 2015
When Sonya Lea's husband, Richard, a physical therapist, was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer, they both knew that it could be a game changer. Two decades and two children along in their marriage, the duo had faced, and overcome, enough deal-breaking challenges to feel confident about weathering this storm as well. When he was offered the option of a brand-new surgical procedure that their doctor called the Mother of All Surgeries (MOAS), they decided to take the risk. Richard came through the operation successfully, but after Sonya was allowed to join him in recovery, she noticed that things were not going as expected, and when he finally awoke, Richard was not just a changed man; he was a different man. Prolonged loss of blood to his brain had cost him nearly all of both long- and short-term memory. Her stunning account of his recovery efforts and her willful refusal to give up on marriage to the stranger occupying her husband's body is fantastically heartfelt and inspiring. The takeaway is a life lesson about partners seeing past the wounds that life inflicts on each of us to find the who we love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)