In the Shadow of Memory

I value this book most as a wonderful family memoir -- of the Skloots 1950s working-to-middle class immigrant experience. I wish everyone could write about their dysfunctional families with the kind of compassion and forgiveness found here.Skloot never flies the victim banner with his physical condition -- on the contrary, it seems to have given him a greater understanding of others. In his forties, he was hit with a virus that left him with some of the same brain malfunctions as his Alzheimers-afflicted mother. The story of his recovered relationship with his brother -- a compulsively over-eating, severe diabetic, and his once terrifying mother, are healing for anyone to read.This is real soul food.

A fierce virus assaulted Floyd Skloot's brain overnight, leaving him severely impaired, mentally. With his productive life changed forever, he began painstakingly writing heroic essays about his experience. Against all odds (given the dour subject), the result is insightful, moving and often downright hilarious. As a writer of poetry and novels, Skloot is able to plumb the depths of his mind for just the right word or phrase to lift his tragedy to heroic levels. By the end of the book, you realize that he has come to the point of viewing his disaster as an opportunity to live a rich and rewarding new life - just on a different level.Inspirational without being cloying.

Floyd Skloot. An unlikely name, an incredible medical survivor, and a monument to the durability of the human spirit. IN THE SHADOW OF MEMORY is a memoir by a man who by rights should be unable to have access to memory. On December 7, 1988 ( a date he frequently references ) Floyd Skloot became infected with a virus that all but destroyed his brain. He was left without the ability to ambulate, to process information, to remember from moment to moment what his intentions were in the most basic maneuvering things of life. Prior to his illness he was a writer and a poet and after fourteen years of heroic struggle, he has been able to write about his journey to acceptance of his condition, his childhood as a member of a family with a highly bizarre mother, a distant father and a gradually self-destructive brother. So with all this permanent brain damage, how is Floyd Skloot able to produce this elegant, compelling, warmly humorous, insightful group of essays? Well, VERY slowly - is the main answer. He explains that it took about eleven months to write one essay, bit by fragmented bit.And what essays they are! The first half of his book is devoted to relating his struggle out of the abyss of an obliterated memory of his past. In his words "Memory is what connects us and memory is what has torn us apart." It is a phenomenal, charismatic paeon to the strength of the human spirit. In the last half we are treated to meditations (with much humor) on "Kismet", "Pal Joey," and "Hamlet" as well as other philosophical meanderings. Finally he comes round the circle of a life that began with a cruelly obsessive-compulsive mother whose rigidity drives the family apart, to a point where he is recovering from an illness that has erased much of his unwanted past, and to a quiescent, final stage of Alzheimer's Disease mother. The irony is at once humorous and touching.To Skloot's credit as a writer, brain injured or no, he presents this wild ride with quiet compassion and sensitivity without ever becoming maudlin. This is book for all of us who think we have had hard knocks in our lives: the teacher, the mentor is here within these lovely pages.

Ostensibly about the permanent effects of a sudden and debilitating virus on his brain and cognitive processes, this collection of superb essays aims for and achieves much larger and ambitious goals. Ultimately, the main subject is the re-assembly of memory -- and the forces at work that impede the reconstruction. Furthermore, Skloot's research into the subject of cognition and memory (he is a writer and poet by trade, not a physician) builds an intriguing thesis: Any child who has been subjected to unpredictable emotional violence from parents may be predisposed to illness. The brain, repeatedly flooded with chemicals during moments of childhood terror and fear, reshapes itself due to the onslaughts. This has implications not only for the "ill" such as himself but for us all. After a first section dealing with his illness, Skloot then offers pieces on the idiosyncracies of his Brooklyn family (he was born in 1947). His mother, in particular, stands at the center of his troubling youth. In the third section, his mother's deterioration through Alzheimer's provides an unlooked for link between mother and son. Skloot is a meticulous practitioner of the essay form and has much to teach anyone learning the form. Altogether, a bravura performance from a highly talented writer.