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On Concussion and Recovery
by Annie Liontas
For readers of Meghan O'Rourke's The Invisible Kingdom, Esme Weijun Wang's The Collected Schizophrenias, and Melissa Febos's Girlhood, a powerful and deeply personal memoir in essays that sheds light on the silent epidemic of head trauma.
Annie Liontas suffered multiple concussions in her thirties. In Sex with a Brain Injury, she writes about what it means to be one of the "walking wounded," facing her fear, her rage, her physical suffering, and the effects of head trauma on her marriage and other relationships. Forced to reckon with her own queer mother's battle with addiction, Liontas finds echoes in their pain. Liontas weaves history, philosophy, and personal accounts to interrogate and expand representations of mental health, ability, and disability—particularly in relation to women and the LGBT community. She uncovers the surprising legacy of brain injury, examining its role in culture, the criminal justice system, and through historical figures like Henry VIII and Harriet Tubman. Encountering Liontas's sharp, affecting prose, the reader can imagine this kind of pain, and having to claw one's way back to a new normal. The hidden gift of injury, Liontas writes, is the ability to connect with others.
For the millions of people who have suffered from concussions and for those who have endeavored to support loved ones through the painful and often baffling experience of head trauma, this astonishing and compassionate narrative offers insight and hope in equal measure.
"These unflinching and eye-opening essays wow at every turn." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An intimate memoir of a profound affliction and resilience…Liontas offers frank reflections on the physical, emotional, and cognitive consequences of her injuries…stands as testimony to love and patience." —Kirkus Reviews
"This is an infuriatingly gorgeous, important book and Liontas is a singular writer." —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
"A riveting book about embodiment, pain, identity, and intimacy. Sex with a Brain Injury rings with the honesty, humor, and intelligence of all my favorite books and is among the best examples of ethical personal writing that I've ever encountered. Annie Liontas is a treasure and this book is a stunning achievement." —Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood
"In Sex with a Brain Injury Annie Liontas has written a guidebook to falling back in love with the unruly body. Liontas renders the intimacy and terror of life after brain injury in rapturous prose, cracking open their own story and those of others who live with invisible, often disbelieved suffering. Yet amid the pain, Liontas excavates moments of bodily delight so sensual they gave me goosebumps. This book is a revelation, a cold compress on anything that aches—the mind, certainly, but also the heart and soul. A sensational read." —Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches
This information about Sex with a Brain Injury was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Annie Liontas is the genderqueer author of the novel Let Me Explain You and the coeditor of A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Gay Magazine, NPR, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Believer, Guernica, McSweeney's, and other publications. A graduate of Syracuse University's MFA program, she is a professor of writing at George Washington University. Annie has served as a mentor for Pen City's incarcerated writers and helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system. She lives in Philadelphia.
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