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A personal story of crisis, commitment, and hope from the best-selling author of Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen.
One day it happens, the dreaded thing that will change your life forever, the more dreadful because, though you've half expected it, you don't know what form it will take or when it will come, and whether or not you will rise to the challenge. For Alix Kates Shulman, it happened on July 22, 2004, at two a.m. on a coastal Maine island in a remote seaside cabin with no electricity, running water, or road to reach it-where the very isolation that makes it a perfect artist's retreat renders it as risky as life itself. She woke to find that her beloved seventy-five-year-old husband had fallen the nine feet from their sleeping loft and was lying on the floor below, naked and deathly still. Though Scott would survive, he suffered an injury that left him seriously brain impaired. He was the same-but not the same.
Each of us has imagined with dread the occurrence of just such an event outside our control that will permanently alter the course of our lives. In this elegant memoir, Shulman describes life on the other side: the ongoing anxieties and risks-and surprising rewards-she experiences as she reorganizes her world and her priorities to care for her husband and discovers that what might have seemed a grim life sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich.
One day it happens, the dreaded thing that will change your life forever, the more dreadful because, though you've half expected it, you don't know what form it will take or when it will come, and whether or not you will rise to the challenge. For Alix Kates Shulman, it happened on July 22, 2004, at two a.m. on a coastal Maine island in a remote seaside cabin with no electricity, running water, or road to reach it-where the very isolation that makes it a perfect artist's retreat renders it as risky as life itself. She woke to find that her beloved seventy-five-year-old husband had fallen the nine feet from their sleeping loft and was lying on the floor below, naked and deathly still. Though Scott would survive, he suffered an injury that left him seriously brain impaired. He was the same-but not the same.
Each of us has imagined with dread the occurrence of just such an event outside our control that will permanently alter the course of our lives. In this elegant memoir, Shulman describes life on the other side: the ongoing anxieties and risks-and surprising rewards-she experiences as she reorganizes her world and her priorities to care for her husband and discovers that what might have seemed a grim life sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich.
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Reviews
"This remarkable book is both an elegy for a man who is gone--the Scott the author married--and a celebration of a man who exists--the Scott with whom she is left after he suffers a traumatic brain injury. It speaks openly and honestly and with exquisite poignancy about the durability of love, about how easy and how hard it is to compass a twilight passion."
Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon
"With the searing honesty and intelligence we've come to expect from Alix Kates Shulman, To Love What Is brings us into a new kind of love story, as moving as any I've ever read. I dare a reader not to have her knowledge of life deepened by this wonderful memoir."
Rebecca Goldstein, author of Properties of Light
"Alix Shulman's To Love What Is is a beautifully rendered portrait of a marriage and what happens when a freak accident leaves her husband impaired. Is it possible to make a medical nightmare exhilarating reading? Yes! Her story is by turns tender, wrenching and brutally honest as Shulman reflects on everything from the grim realities of hospital life to nurturing, to separation, to the exulting a
Patricia Bosworth, author of Diane Arbus