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.