Sonya Lea

When I was a tween, I had a generalized tonic-clonic seizure. It's bookended by flashbulb memories: one of sitting down to play a video game and the other of waking up and the sinking realization that I had lost at least half an hour of time -- that apparently before the seizure, I'd been acting perfectly normally for at least thirty minutes after the last thing I remember. Tweendom is a pretty existential time at the best of times, so I doubt it's very surprising to say that this experience left me obsessed with the idea of personhood and memory: who are we if we can't remember ourself? Is continuity of personhood an illusion? These are the questions that are really at the heart of Wondering Who You Are. Sonya Lea's husband suffers complete retrograde amnesia following a (life-saving) experimental cancer therapy and anoxic brain injury.

Some readers complained that it is a completely internally focused narrative of Lea -- the wife of the actual patient -- and that's kind of the point. The book is really an exploration of who you become when you don't remember yourself and how that affects the people defined by their relationship to you. I found it brave, introspective and thoughtful. Lea doesn't flinch from examining the hardest parts of herself. Unlike in [b:Are You My Mother?|11566956|Are You My Mother?|Alison Bechdel|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1511409644s/11566956.jpg|16507555], where I found this cringeworthy, Lea's narrative voice is removed enough that it works. She discusses her own alcoholism, her husband's physical abuse of their children, and who these truths change in a world where his former self is lost.

If I have a criticism it's that Lea's insight was curiously silent when it came to her privilege, which was on display in spades: they move to California from Seattle on a whim, only to then spend four months in France and another several months "housesitting" in California wine country. Lea spends an entire year doing nothing except exactly what she wants (as a physician parent, I sometimes feel overly indulgent spending an hour doing only things I want to do.) and the throw gads and gads of money on holistic medicine, faith healers and other therapies. Money, time and job obligation problems are usually looming for people with major medical challenges, out of work on disability, so for them to be so strikingly absent was distractingly notable.

Which I guess is my last point: Lea is definitely not the sort of person I'd be friends with if I ran into her in real life. I found her flighty and gullible. But you don't have to like someone to learn from and admire them, and this is a fantastic book. Lea is unflinching when discussing the difficulty of being a caretaker and I think she has a lot to say not just on disability, but on relationships and personhood.… (altro)

Sonya Lea is truly an overwhelming woman in terms of her awareness and ability to handle such an array of problems. Her willingness to dig so deeply into her family's situation was fascinating as well as exhausting---how many people could deal as well as apparently she did, with so many different things at a time revolving around her husband's condition of first a horrible form of cancer and then an incredible blow to his brain health. Her lists of problems, medical, financial, legal, family, etc., etc., just went on and on. Her energy was frankly, astounding---both physical and mental---almost exhausting to read! The couple she describes in the beginning are really two different people in the end---a fascinating memoir in many, many ways.… (altro)