Being with Rachel: A Story of Memory and Survival

This book is a must read for anyone who has had a family member suffer a TBI (traumatic brain injury) and I wish those who don't deal with TBI's to read it so they have an understanding of those who do have one. I have a son who suffered one and even though his wasn't as severe as Rachel's, there were parts of Rachel's problems that he also dealt with. This book is also a wonderful story that miracles do happen. I think Rachel's mother was the driving force in her recovery. Great Book

Atop all the courageous acts in this story, the final and most lasting one is Karen Brennan's commitment of her story to print. In her turmoil's depths, she attests to uncomfortable truths and confesses her impassioned dismay that love is sometimes mixed with guilt, that hope is a hairsbreadth from dread, that the cruelest and most unjust penalty is in another light a largesse with unending rewards. Most impressive is the revelatory presentation of an active mind (or perhaps two minds) learning, reformulating, performing. In her new role as caregiver researching her daughter's brain injury, Brennan confronts anew terms she had understood as fiction instructor and critical theorist: reading this, you'll come to know that what you appreciate in your favorite author or in your best friend's letters is your own innate complicity in a good act of perserveration or confabulation or dissociation. The gradual reunderstanding of memory and narrative is a thrill to experience.Notwithstanding her publisher's marketing strategy, this is far more than a story of survival; and though she may share with Mark Doty or John Bayley a life marked by caregiving and loss, Brennan authors a far finer literary memoir, imaginatively and unsympathetically crafted, with a style more akin to the radical sincerity of J.R. Ackerley or Annie Ernaux or Herve Guibert. These are your best friend's letters. Karen Brennan is your favorite author.

This is a wonderfully touching story of brain injury survival that hasn't been seen much. Instead of from a survivors voice, it's from a parents voice. What a couragous and strong woman Karen is. This book shows you what daily life is like living with a survivor. This story reads alot like my own. I identified with Rachel on a very personal level and put me in touch even more with perhaps what my mother went through with me. This is such good writting that I feel I know Karen and her family personally. And not becuase I have brain injury. Read this book! Even if you don't know brain injury, this can apply to any life altering stuggle people go through.

Brennan's subject is much larger than the aftermath of the tragedy that happened to her daughter. Is her daughter a different person because of her brain injury? Is Brennan, now, becoming a different person because of the way her relationship to her daughter is changing? Brennan worries questions of identity, personality, and the significance of memory with an astonishingly light touch, and she tells a terrific story. You could almost say that Brennan has made good somehow of the tragedy, turned her daughter into an inspiring lesson for all of us--except that Brennan is too smart and too observant of life to be that reductive. Her Rachel is no lesson; she's a treasure and a pain and a person-and-a-half. An often funny, heartening, and inspiring book.

Honest as it is graceful, lucid as it is lovely. Brennan's book deals with the shades of loss and reconciliation inherent in the land of the "mind" where identity and the "self" that we love when we love a daughter, sister, friend is housed and jeopardized on that accidental and foreign map of the brain trauma, coma, and finally memory loss(es) and gains. Being with Rachel visits that daughter, sister, friend, collaborative relationship that walks and tells and re-tells those stories, shared and re-made, until finally, there are paths carved well-enough that two--mothers, daughters, sisters, friends might walk together. A wonderful read.