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A Stitch of Time: The Year a Brain Injury Changed My Language and Life
A Stitch of Time: The Year a Brain Injury Changed My Language and Life
A Stitch of Time: The Year a Brain Injury Changed My Language and Life
Audiobook11 hours

A Stitch of Time: The Year a Brain Injury Changed My Language and Life

Written by Lauren Marks

Narrated by Tavia Gilbert

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

Lauren Marks was twenty-seven when an aneurysm ruptured in her brain and left her fighting for her life. She woke up in a hospital soon after with serious deficiencies to her reading, speaking, and writing abilities, and an unfamiliar diagnosis: aphasia. This would be shocking news for anyone, but Lauren was a voracious reader, an actress, director, dramaturg, and pursuing her PhD. At any other period of her life, this diagnosis would have been a devastating blow. But she woke up . . . different. She returned to her childhood home to recover, grappling with a muted inner monologue and fractured sense of self.

Soon after, Lauren began a journal to chronicle her year following the rupture. A Stitch of Time is the remarkable result, an Oliver Sacks-like case study of a brain slowly piecing itself back together, featuring clinical research interwoven with Lauren's personal narrative and actual journal entries that marked her progress. Alternating between fascination and frustration, she relearns and re-experiences many of the things we take for granted. Deeply personal and powerful, A Stitch of Time is an unforgettable journey of self-discovery, resilience, and hope.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 2, 2017
ISBN9781515988885
Author

Lauren Marks

Lauren Marks is a Los Angeles native and a New York University, Tisch School of the Arts graduate. She spent a decade in professional theater and pursued a PhD at The Graduate Center at City University of New York. Lauren was an Emerging Voices Fellow for PEN Center USA. She has been awarded grants from the Bread Loaf Writing Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VCCA France, Ragdale, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Yaddo, and is an active advocate for those who live with language disorders like aphasia. A Stitch of Time is her first book.

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Reviews for A Stitch of Time

Rating: 4.0192307000000005 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Lauren is a student and aspiring actress in her early twenties when she suffers a ruptured aneurysm that robs her of much of her language skills. Suddenly she finds herself struggling for words, taking hours to read a single page of a book and having difficulty remembering her own life and relationships. The book follows the months and years after her brain injury and the journey of curiosity that leads her to question things that she previously took for granted. We as humans invest so much of our identity in our memories and abilities. What happens when our brains get scrambled? Are we still the same people? Can life ever be truly normal again? A truly one-of-a-kind book written by a woman who has beaten all odds to recover herself.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As a lover of memoirs and science, I really enjoyed this book and was deeply moved by Lauren Mark's story. As other reviewers have mentioned, the narrator did not give the best performance, but it did not take away from my overall enjoyment of this book, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in medicine and stories of recovery.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Lauren Marks was twenty-seven years old when, in the middle of a karaoke performance, an aneurysm burst in her brain. She was lucky to survive, but the damage left her with aphasia: a great difficulty not only in producing coherent speech, but in perceiving just how badly affected her speech was. It also left her unable to read, gave her difficulties in following the speech of others, and even silenced her own inner voice. It also affected her memory. She wasn't exactly afflicted with amnesia, but she found it difficult to bring to mind or emotionally connect with personal memories. Over time, thanks to brain plasticity and speech therapy, much of her facility with words came back, but what she refers to as "the rupture" was clearly not only a physical rupture in her brain, but a discontinuity between the person she used to be and the person she had become.In this memoir, Marks writes thoughtfully about her experiences after "the rupture," including her time with very little language in her brain, her relationships with the people in her life as she made her recovery, and her musings on language and memory as informed by both her own experiences and what she has learned since about scientific thinking on the subjects. It's all very interesting, and I particularly appreciated how careful she is to acknowledge the fallibility of her own memory while narrating events, and to stress that her experiences of aphasia aren't universal and that the sense those experiences have given her of how language works in the brain isn't definitive. I can't help contrasting that careful, humble, refreshingly open approach with the way Jill Bolte seemed to want to present her own experiences with neural damage as providing some kind of definitive mystical revelation in My Stroke of Insight, which I have to admit made me a little uncomfortable.I will also say that Marks' writing is perfectly clear, readable, and fluent. Whether that's a testament to the progress she's made in her recovery, the strategies she uses to compensate for her difficulties, or some excellent editing, I don't know, but I'd suspect it's probably a combination of all three.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    "If I could write the thing, I could read it. If I could read the thing, I could often say it. The process indicated that there was much more to explore, a rapturous language life that could be sought, and more importantly, found.”Lauren Marks suffered a life-threatening brain aneurysm at the age of just 27, and her account of her recovery makes for a fascinating (if sometimes hard to read) book. What happened to her would be obviously brutal for anyone, but for an actress and writer whose life revolved around books, it must have been devastating. Her very sense of self was wrapped up in language, and the aneurysm detached her from the language and the life she knew.What I liked best about her book is her re-creation of her recovery, bit by bit, and word by word (literally). At its best, her book is an interesting mix of her personal journey and the neurological science underlying what was happening to her. It's an offbeat and unsettling book, but it mostly works in some unexpected and interesting ways. This is obviously an intensely personal book, and that always makes for some uncomfortable reading. Fair enough. But too much of Marks's book was just a little too honest for me. There is a lot of detail on the travails of her personal life (with her dad, and especially with her boyfriend), some of which I could have done without.As for the audiobook narration, there was something about Tavia Gilbert's voice and reading style that didn't quite work for me -- it just didn't seem a good fit for the material here. And for me, I think that added to the awkward feeling I experienced reading/hearing much of Marks's book.The awkwardness aside, this is a raw and unflinching story that is ultimately worthwhile. Marks is nothing if not brave and resilient, and that shines through in her account. Recommended.(Thanks to Simon & Schuster and Tantor for a complimentary audio version in exchange for an unbiased review.)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    What if you woke up one day and were unable to communicate? Lauren Marks suffered a cerebral embolism while thousands of miles from home, and discovered she needed to re-learn how to put words together to read, write, speak, and communicate. This memoir of Lauren's medical trauma and subsequent recovery provided the right mix of scientific information and personal struggle. I was impressed by Lauren's ability to so explain what she went through in a manner that leaves the reader rooting for her. I ended up passing the book on to a friend who is studying speech pathology, as it struck me as the type of material that would benefit anyone who wants to work with individuals relearning language. I was disappointed in the narrator.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fascinating account of a young woman's experience of losing her language skills as a result of cerebral embolism. Interesting insights into language acquisition in children and relearning experience as an adult.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was so excited to get this book, and all my expectations were so far beyond met. I got this book as a audio file and got so excited to use it during a long road trip over the 4th of July holiday. Lauren Marks' story of her recovery worked so well for a audiobook, and her story just rocked. Super proud to have gotten to read this story.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    At the age of 27, Lauren Marks collapsed in an Edinburgh pub due to a brain aneurysm, which caused aphasia. And thus began her long journey to recovery, relearning language, writing, reading – and memories. She kept a diary of her progress which assisted her in writing this personal memoir. Read by Tavia Gilbert, the listener is right there with Lauren. The story reads like fiction and is all the more effective knowing it is not.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I could not review as I do not have a MP3 ready CD player. I will donate it to my Friends of the Library. N