On My Radar:

The Sinatra Club: My Life Inside the New York Mafia
Sal Polisi
Pocket Books
Mass Market Paperback

From the publisher's website:

The Mob was the biggest, richest business in America . . . until it was destroyed from within by drugs, greed, and the decline of its traditional crime Family values.

And by guys like Sal Polisi.

As a member of New York’s feared Colombo Family, Polisi ran The Sinatra Club, an illegal after-hours gambling den that was a magic kingdom of crime and a hangout for up-and-coming mobsters like John Gotti and the three wiseguys immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas—Henry Hill, Jimmy Burke, and Tommy DeSimone. But the nonstop thrills of Polisi’s criminal glory days abruptly ended when he was busted for drug trafficking. Already sickened by the bloodbath that engulfed the Mob as it teetered toward extinction, he flipped and became one of a breed he had loathed all his life—a rat. In this shocking, pulse-pounding, and, at times, darkly hilarious first-person chronicle, he paints a never-before-seen picture of a larger-than-life secret underworld that, thanks to guys like him, no longer exists. 

On My Radar:

The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld
Justin Hocking
Graywolf Press
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:


Justin Hocking lands in New York hopeful but adrift—he's jobless, unexpectedly overwhelmed and disoriented by the city, struggling with anxiety and obsession, and attempting to maintain a faltering long-distance relationship. As a man whose brand of therapy has always been motion, whether in a skate park or on a snowdrift, Hocking needs an outlet for his restlessness. Then he spies his first New York surfer hauling a board to the subway, and its not long before he's a member of the vibrant and passionate surfing community at Far Rockaway. But in the wake of a traumatic robbery incident, the dark undercurrents of his ocean-obsession pull him further and further out on his own night sea journey.

   With Moby-Dick as a touchstone, and interspersed with interludes on everything from the history of surfing to Scientology's naval ties to the environmental impact of the Iraq War, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld is a multifaceted and enduring modern odyssey from a memorable and whip-smart new literary voice.

In My TBR Stack:

Teaching the Cat to Sit: A Memoir
Michelle Theall
Gallery Books
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Nuanced and poignant, heartrending and funny, Michelle Theall’s thoughtful memoir is a universal story about our quest for unconditional love from our parents, our children, and most important, from ourselves. 

Even when society, friends, the legal system, and the Pope himself swing toward acceptance of the once unacceptable, Michelle Theall still waits for the one blessing that has always mattered to her the most: her mother’s. Michelle grew up in the conservative Texas Bible Belt, bullied by her classmates and abandoned by her evangelical best friend before she’d ever even held a girl’s hand. She was often at odds with her volatile, overly dramatic, and depressed mother, who had strict ideas about how girls should act. Yet they both clung tightly to their devout Catholic faith—the unifying grace that all but shattered their relationship when Michelle finally admitted she was gay.

Years later at age forty-two, Michelle has made delicate peace with her mother and is living her life openly with her partner of ten years and their adopted son in the liberal haven of Boulder, Colorado. But when her four-year-old’s Catholic school decides to expel all children of gay parents, Michelle tiptoes into a controversy that exposes her to long-buried shame, which leads to a public battle with the Church and a private one with her parents. In the end she realizes that in order to be a good mother, she may have to be a bad daughter.

Michelle writes with wry wit and bald honesty about her life, seamlessly weaving her past and her present into a touching commentary on all the love, pain, and redemption that families inspire. Teaching the Cat to Sit makes us each reflect on our sense of humanity, our connection to religion, and our struggles to accept ourselves—and each other—as we are.

On My Radar:

Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball
John Feinstein
Doubleday
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

“No one grows up playing baseball pretending that they’re pitching or hitting in Triple-A.” —Chris Schwinden, Triple-A pitcher

“If you don’t like it here, do a better job.” —Ron Johnson, Triple-A manager

John Feinstein gave readers an unprecedented view of the PGA Tour in A Good Walk Spoiled. He opened the door to an NCAA basketball locker room in his explosive bestseller A Season on the Brink. Now, turning his eye to our national pastime, sports journalist John Feinstein explores the colorful and mysterious world of minor-league baseball—a gateway through which all major-league players pass in their careers . . . hoping never to return.

     Baseball’s minor leagues are a paradox. For some players, the minors are a glorious launching pad toward years of fame and fortune; for others, a crash-landing pad when injury or poor play forces a big leaguer back to a life of obscure ballparks and cramped buses instead of Fenway Park and plush charter planes. Focusing exclusively on the Triple-A level, one step beneath Major League Baseball, Feinstein introduces readers to nine unique men: three pitchers, three position players, two managers, and an umpire. Through their compelling stories, Feinstein pulls back the veil on a league that is chock-full of gifted baseball players, managers, and umpires who are all one moment away from getting called up—or back—to the majors.

     The stories are hard to believe: a first-round draft pick and pitching ace who rocketed to major-league success before finding himself suddenly out of the game, hatching a presumptuous plan to get one more shot at the mound; a home run–hitting former World Series hero who lived the dream, then bounced among six teams before facing the prospects of an unceremonious end to his career; a big-league All-Star who, in the span of five months, went from being completely out of baseball to becoming a star in the ALDS, then signing a $10 million contract; and a well-liked designated hitter who toiled for eighteen seasons in the minors—a record he never wanted to set—before facing his final, highly emotional chance for a call-up to the big leagues.

     From Raleigh to Pawtucket, from Lehigh Valley to Indianapolis and beyond, Where Nobody Knows Your Name gives readers an intimate look at a baseball world not normally seen by the fans. John Feinstein gets to the heart of the human stories in a uniquely compelling way, crafting a masterful book that stands alongside his very best works.

Now in Paperback:

Outlaw: Waylon Willie, Kris, and the Renegades of Nashville
Michael Streissguth
It Books
Trade Paperback (available 2/25/14)

From the publisher's website:

The definitive story of how three country music legends -- Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson -- changed music in Nashville.

By the late 1960’s, young people from all over the country were streaming into Nashville, Tennessee. The city was the center of the booming country music industry and home to what was known as the Nashville Sound, characterized by slick production and an increasingly overused formula.

But three trailblazing artists would soon rock the foundations of Nashville’s music business. Tapping into the burgeoning underground scene and the traditions of civil rights leaders and antiwar protestors, Waylon, Willie and Kris resisted Nashville’s music-making machine and forged their own paths, creating music that was more personal, not easily categorized, and in the vein of rock acts of the time.

Drawing on extensive research and probing interviews with Kris Kristofferson, Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark, Cowboy Jack Clement and others, Michael Streissguth brings to life an incredible chapter in musical history and reveals for the first time a surprising outlaw zeitgeist in Nashville. Outlaw is a fascinating glimpse into three of the most legendary artists of our times.

In Stores Now:

After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story
Michael Hainey
Scribner
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

“Family? Secrets? Sometimes I think they are the same thing.” So writes Michael Hainey in this unforgettable story of a son’s search to discover the decades-old truth about his father’s mysterious death. Hainey was a boy of six when his father, a bright and shining star in the glamorous, hard-living world of 1960s Chicago newspapers, died under mysterious circumstances. His tragic absence left behind not only a young widow and two small sons but questions about family and truth that would obsess Michael for decades.

Years later, Michael undertakes a risky journey to uncover the true story about what happened to his father. Prodding reluctant relatives and working through a network of his father’s old colleagues, Michael begins to reconcile the father he lost with the one he comes to know. At the heart of his quest is his mother, a woman of courage and tenacity—and a steely determination to press on with her life. A universal story of love and loss and the resilience of family in the face of hardship, After Visiting Friends is the account of a son who goes searching for his father, and in the journey discovers new love and admiration for his mother.

On My Radar:

Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story of How and Why We Survived
Chip Walter
Bloomsbury USA
Trade Paperback

From the publisher's website:

Over the past 180 years scientists have discovered evidence that at least twenty-seven species of humans evolved on planet Earth. What enabled us to survive when all the others were shown the evolutionary door?

Chip Walter tells the intriguing tale of how against all odds and despite nature’s capricious ways we stand here today, the planet’s most dominant species. Drawing on a wide variety of scientific disciplines, he reveals how a rare evolutionary phenomenon led to the uniquely long childhoods that make us so resourceful and emotionally complex. Walter explains how the evolution of our highly social nature has shaped our moral (and immoral) behavior. He also plumbs the roots of our creativity and investigates why we became self-aware in ways that no other animal is. Along the way, Last Ape Standing profiles the mysterious "others" who evolved with us—the Neanderthals of Europe, the "hobbits" of Indonesia, the Denisovans of Siberia, and the recently discovered Red Deer Cave people of China, who died off just as we stood on the brink of civilization eleven thousand years ago.

Last Ape Standing is evocative science writing at its best—a witty, engaging and accessible story that explores the evolutionary events that molded us into the remarkably unique creatures we are.

In My TBR Stack:

Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness
Neil Swidey
Crown Publishing
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

The harrowing story of five men who were sent into a dark, airless, miles-long tunnel, hundreds of feet below the ocean, to do a nearly impossible job—with deadly results

A quarter-century ago, Boston had the dirtiest harbor in America. The city had been dumping sewage into it for generations, coating the seafloor with a layer of “black mayonnaise.” Fisheries collapsed, wildlife fled, and locals referred to floating tampon applicators as “beach whistles.”

In the 1990s, work began on a state-of-the-art treatment plant and a 10-mile-long tunnel—its endpoint stretching farther from civilization than the earth’s deepest ocean trench—to carry waste out of the harbor. With this impressive feat of engineering, Boston was poised to show the country how to rebound from environmental ruin. But when bad decisions and clashing corporations endangered the project, a team of commercial divers was sent on a perilous mission to rescue the stymied cleanup effort. Five divers went in; not all of them came out alive. 

Drawing on hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents collected over five years of reporting, award-winning writer Neil Swidey takes us deep into the lives of the divers, engineers, politicians, lawyers, and investigators involved in the tragedy and its aftermath, creating a taut, action-packed narrative. The climax comes just after the hard-partying DJ Gillis and his friend Billy Juse trade assignments as they head into the tunnel, sentencing one of them to death. 

An intimate portrait of the wreckage left in the wake of lives lost, the book—which Dennis Lehane calls "extraordinary" and compares with The Perfect Storm—is also a morality tale. What is the true cost of these large-scale construction projects, as designers and builders, emboldened by new technology and pressured to address a growing population’s rapacious needs, push the limits of the possible? This is a story about human risk—how it is calculated, discounted, and transferred—and the institutional failures that can lead to catastrophe.

Suspenseful yet humane, Trapped Under the Sea reminds us that behind every bridge, tower, and tunnel—behind the infrastructure that makes modern life possible—lies unsung bravery and extraordinary sacrifice. 

On My Radar:

The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond
Michael Sims
Bloomsbury USA
Hardcover (available Feb 18, 2014)

From the publisher's website:

Henry David Thoreau has long been an intellectual icon and folk hero. In this strikingly original profile, Michael Sims reveals how the bookish, quirky young man who kept quitting jobs evolved into the patron saint of environmentalism and nonviolent activism.

Working from nineteenth-century letters and diaries by Thoreau’s family, friends, and students, Sims charts Henry’s course from his time at Harvard through the years he spent living in a cabin beside Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.

Sims uncovers a previously hidden Thoreau—the rowdy boy reminiscent of Tom Sawyer, the sarcastic college iconoclast, the devoted son who kept imitating his beloved older brother’s choices in life. Thoreau was deeply influenced by his parents—his father owned a pencil factory in Concord, his mother was an abolitionist and social activist—and by Ralph Waldo Emerson, his frequent mentor. Sims relates intimate, telling moments in Thoreau’s daily life—in Emerson’s library; teaching his neighbor and friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to row a boat; exploring the natural world and Native American culture; tutoring Emerson’s nephew on Staten Island and walking the streets of New York in the hope of launching a writing career.

Returned from New York, Thoreau approached Emerson to ask if he could build a cabin on his mentor’s land on the shores of Walden Pond, anticipating the isolation would galvanize his thoughts and actions. That it did. While at the cabin, he wrote his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and refined the journal entries that formed the core of Walden. Resisting what he felt were unfair taxes, he spent the night in jail that led to his celebrated essay “Civil Disobedience,” which would inspire the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Chronicling Thoreau’s youthful transformation, Sims reveals how this decade would resonate over the rest of his life, and thereafter throughout American literature and history.

What I'm Reading Now:

Train: Riding the Rails That Created the Modern World - from the Trans-Siberian to the Southwest Chief
Tom Zoellner
Viking
Hardcover (in stores now)

From the publisher's website:

Tom Zoellner loves trains with a ferocious passion. In his new book he chronicles the innovation and sociological impact of the railway technology that changed the world, and could very well change it again.

From the frigid trans-Siberian railroad to the antiquated Indian Railways to the futuristic MagLev trains, Zoellner offers a stirring story of man’s relationship with trains. Zoellner examines both the mechanics of the rails and their engines and how they helped societies evolve. Not only do trains transport people and goods in an efficient manner, but they also reduce pollution and dependency upon oil. Zoellner also considers America’s culture of ambivalence to mass transit, using the perpetually stalled line between Los Angeles and San Francisco as a case study in bureaucracy and public indifference.

Train presents both an entertaining history of railway travel around the world while offering a serious and impassioned case for the future of train travel.

On My Radar:

The News: A User's Manual
Alain De Botton
Knopf Doubleday
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:


The news is everywhere. We can’t stop constantly checking it on our computer screens, but what is this doing to our minds?

We are never really taught how to make sense of the torrent of news we face every day, writes Alain de Botton (author of the best-selling The Architecture of Happiness), but this has a huge impact on our sense of what matters and of how we should lead our lives. In his dazzling new book, de Botton takes twenty-five archetypal news stories—including an airplane crash, a murder, a celebrity interview and a political scandal—and submits them to unusually intense analysis with a view to helping us navigate our news-soaked age. He raises such questions as Why are disaster stories often so uplifting? What makes the love lives of celebrities so interesting? Why do we enjoy watching politicians being brought down? Why are upheavals in far-off lands often so boring?

In The News: A User’s Manual, de Botton has written the ultimate guide for our frenzied era, certain to bring calm, understanding and a measure of sanity to our daily (perhaps even hourly) interactions with the news machine.

(With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)

On My Radar:

Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell
Phil Lapsley
Grove Atlantic
Trade Paperback


From the publisher's website:

Before smartphones and iPads, before the Internet or the personal computer, a misfit group of technophiles, blind teenagers, hippies, and outlaws figured out how to hack the world’s largest machine: the telephone system. By the middle of the twentieth century the telephone system had grown into something extraordinary, a web of cutting-edge switching machines and human operators that linked together millions of people like never before. But the network had a billion-dollar flaw, and once people discovered it, things would never be the same. 

Phil Lapsley’s Exploding the Phone traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of phone phreaks who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, and the counterculture movement that argued you should rip off the phone company to fight against the war in Vietnam. 

AT&T responded with “Greenstar,” an unprecedented project that would ultimately tap some thirty-three million telephone calls and record 1.5 million of them. The FBI fought back, too, especially when a phone phreak showed a confidential informant how he could remotely eavesdrop on FBI calls. Phone phreaking exploded into the popular culture, with famous actors, musicians, and investors caught with “blue boxes,” many of them built by two young phone phreaks named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Soon, the phone phreaks, the feds, and the phone company were at war. 

Based on original interviews and declassified documents, Exploding the Phone is a captivating, ground-breaking work about an important part of our cultural and technological history. 

“If we hadn’t built blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.” —Steve Jobs 

“The definitive account of the first generation of network hackers… at turns a technological love story, a counter cultural history and a generation-spanning epic.” —Kevin Poulsen, news editor of Wired.com and author of Kingpin

On My Radar:

The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day
David J. Hand
Scientific American Books
Hardcover


From the distributor's website:

In The Improbability Principle, the renowned statistician David J. Hand argues that extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.
     But Hand is no believer in superstitions, prophecies, or the paranormal. His definition of “miracle” is thoroughly rational. No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive. All we need, Hand argues, is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough.
     Together, these constitute Hand’s groundbreaking Improbability Principle. And together, they explain why we should not be so surprised to bump into a friend in a foreign country, or to come across the same unfamiliar word four times in one day. Hand wrestles with seemingly less explicable questions as well: what the Bible and Shakespeare have in common, why financial crashes are par for the course, and why lightning does strike the same place (and the same person) twice. Along the way, he teaches us how to use the Improbability Principle in our own lives—including how to cash in at a casino and how to recognize when a medicine is truly effective.
     An irresistible adventure into the laws behind “chance” moments and a trusty guide for understanding the world and universe we live in, The Improbability Principle will transform how you think about serendipity and luck, whether it’s in the world of business and finance or you’re merely sitting in your backyard, tossing a ball into the air and wondering where it will land.

In My TBR Stack:

Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend
Tony Fletcher
It Books
Trade Paperback
Original hardcover publication 1999; original paperback publication 2000

A biography of the brilliant and troubled drummer of the rock band The Who.



Publisher website

Author website

Author twitter

Author interview in the Village Voice

BookSpin Review:

The Death Class: A True Story About Life
by Erika Hayasaki
Simon and Schuster
Hardcover


   I would guess that most of us have a teacher we call our favorite.  In my case, it was the first adult that didn't treat me like a kid, even though I still was one.  In Erika Hayasaki's fantastic book The Death Class, Norma Bowe joins my list of teachers I wish I'd had.

Norma teaches a class called Death in Perspective at Kean University in Union, New Jersey.  In addition to being a teacher, Bowe is a registered nurse.   Through her skillful narrative, Hayasaki highlights the personal stories of several students in the class -- and their stories are emotional and powerful.  They each have their own reasons for taking this unusual class on death, but they are stories to which most of us can relate.  We have all, by the time we are adults, dealt with death on some level.  Some students that take the class may be morbidly curious but surely others need closure.

A more passionate and competent companion on that path to closure would be hard to find.  Norma Bowe is an amazing woman.  Her own story as to why she teaches the class is as nuanced and raw as the reasons the students attend.

This book was a quick read.  I couldn't wait to use every available moment to pick it up and rejoin the people inside.  It made me think as a good book should, and if you want to think a little differently about the end of life, I can suggest The Death Class as a gentle introduction.

Book Trailers

PROMISE LAND
by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro
Simon and Schuster




UNREMARRIED WIDOW
by Artis Henderson
Simon and Schuster

Nonfiction Links

Ten Lessons in Nonfiction Writing (thecreativepen.com)


5 Nonfiction Books That Every Writer Should Read (tloclub.com)


150 Great Articles and Essays (tetw.org)


Janet Malcolm, the Art of Nonfiction No. 4 (theparisreview.org)


Experts Break Down the Elements of a Nonfiction Book Proposal (mediabistro.com)

On My Radar:

Lincoln's Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image
by Joshua Zeitz
Viking
Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

Lincoln’s official secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay enjoyed more access, witnessed more history, and knew Lincoln better than anyone outside of the president’s immediate family. Hay and Nicolay were the gatekeepers of the Lincoln legacy. They read poetry and attended the theater with the president, commiserated with him over Union army setbacks, and plotted electoral strategy. They were present at every seminal event, from the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation to Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address—and they wrote about it after his death.

In their biography of Lincoln, Hay and Nicolay fought to establish Lincoln’s heroic legacy and to preserve a narrative that saw slavery—not states’ rights—as the sole cause of the Civil War. As Joshua Zeitz shows, the image of a humble man with uncommon intellect who rose from obscurity to become a storied wartime leader and emancipator is very much their creation.

Drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs, Lincoln’s Boys is part political drama and part coming-of-age tale—a fascinating story of friendship, politics, war, and the contest over history and remembrance.

- - - - - -

The Tooth Fairy: A Memoir

by Clifford Chase

The Overlook Press

Hardcover

From the publisher's website:

In shimmering prose that weaves among intimate confessions, deadpan asides, and piercing observations on the fear and turmoil that defined the long decade after 9/11, Clifford Chase tells the stories that have shaped his adulthood.

There are his aging parents, whose disagreements sharpen as their health declines; and his beloved brother, lost tragically to AIDS; and his long-term boyfriend—always present, but always kept at a distance.

There is also the revelatory, joyful music of the B-52s, Chase’s sexual confusion in his twenties, and more recently, the mysterious appearance in his luggage of weird objects from Iran the year his mother died.

In the midst of all this is Chase’s singular voice—incisive, wry, confiding, by turns cool or emotional, always engaging.

The way this book is written—in pitch-perfect fragments—is crucial to Chase’s deeper message: that we experience and remember in short bursts of insight, terror, comedy, and love. As ambitious in its form as it is in its radical candor, The Tooth Fairy is the rare memoir that can truly claim to rethink the genre.

Monday Excerpt

I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia
by Su Meck with Daniel de Vise
Simon & Schuster 
Hardcover
Available February 4th, 2014

Excerpt:

I never had aspirations as a writer. But here I am, writing. I was a difficult child. But evidently I wasn’t all that different from most other children growing up in the 1960s and 70s. I lacked motivation in school. And yet report cards show me to be an excellent student. I got drunk a lot as a teenager but I have never tasted alcohol. I have no idea what falling in love feels like, and yet I have been married for almost thirty years.

These examples are just a small sampling of the many incon- sistencies that make up my life as I know it. Actually, my lives. I have at least two of them. My first life began when I was born in the summer of 1965 and progressed through until the spring of 1988. I do not have any genuine memories from any of this first life. Then there is the life I mostly remember living since roughly 1991 or 1992. But I have discovered recently that I have several other “lives” as well. Because I depend solely on the stories of others to fill in decades of living, anecdotes about who I was, what I did, and how I lived, I have found that my life story varies depending on whom I talk to. And a lot of the time, accounts of a certain event don’t just differ but totally contradict each other.

I had no idea how much this life of mine would transform when I first began telling my story. After Daniel de Visé’s article about me appeared in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post, on May 21, 2011, suddenly my family and I were big news. I became kind of a poster child for traumatic brain injury (TBI). People wanted to interview me on both radio and television. I received hundreds of e-mails from people living all over the world relating their own struggles living with TBI, and telling me that my story gave them hope.

Literary agents began contacting me asking if I would be willing to write a memoir, and at first the thought of writing a book seemed preposterous to me. But as I read about the hopes, as well as the frustrations, of other people who were reaching out to me, it suddenly dawned on me that maybe telling my story could help get the word out about what it is like to live in an often confusing world, made even more confusing because of a baffling brain injury.

However, if I agreed to write my story, I wanted to make sure that I would be able to tell the whole sordid tale, not only with my family’s permission but with their blessing as well. This story is not some kind of fairy tale that begins with “once upon a time” and ends with “and everyone lived happily ever after.” I wanted to write truth. And that’s when it began to get tricky. As my husband, Jim, and I like to say, the whole thing was a mission “fraught with peril.” How is someone like me, with no memories of at least the first twenty something years of her life, supposed to write a memoir? And how are friends and family in the year 2013 supposed to remember exactly what I was like and what I was doing in 1965? 1972? 1980? How are those same friends and family members supposed to remember what exactly happened on a Sunday afternoon in May of 1988?

With the help of Daniel de Visé, I was able to track down my medical records from the hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. Dan agreed to undertake the job of researcher, investigating some of the medical breakthroughs that have been made in the science of the brain since the 1980s, as well as brain conditions that continue to baffle the medical community. He then sifted through all of those details and made an attempt to explain them to me. In addition, I have spoken with many people who knew me as I was growing up. I have had long conversations with my parents and siblings, as well as other close family members and friends.

It is difficult for me to be so unbelievably dependent on stories about myself from other people as I try to get to the truth about my life. Part of me realizes that I will never really know exactly what I was like before my head injury or understand why I am the way I am now. But another part of me stubbornly refuses to give up as I try desperately to fit pieces together in an ever-changing life-size puzzle.

From I FORGOT TO REMEMBER by Su Meck. Copyright © 2014 by Su Meck. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.