To Love What Is: A Marriage Transformed

Why a masterpiece? Because with craft and crisp personal honesty the writer snuck past all my defenses and answered the most debilitating life question: What's the point? Answer: To love someone who loves you and forge a bond so dense and indestructible that even when one lover suffers brain damage that destroys the original balance of giving and taking, what remains from the past and in the present is still what it's all about. Whatever I have read or heard in the past on the subjet of love has failed to penetrate as deeply as this slim, beautifully written story about the love of Scott and Alix that only bloomed in their fifties and how Alix soldiers with ingenuity and courage through the demands inflicted on their love by Scott's accident. Alix is a strong, independent feminist activist who found in Scott the only man (after two husbands and countless lovers)she could have loved so deeply. How lucky! Perhaps. Perhaps one can make one's luck or at least contribute to it. And so I try to strengthen my love for now and for what may remain. What more can a book do for a reader? Thank you Alix Kates Shulman

This is one of the most moving books I have ever read. It is a love story about Alix & Scott and how their life becomes totally transformed after Scott's suffers a devastating brain injury. Surprisingly, the book is not depressing, but truly inspiring & even uplifting. It is a beautifully written book; the author seamlessly weaves present with past (when the couple first met). Her descriptions of their life in NYC & on an island in Maine are riveting. I will never forget the sight of Alix & Scott dancing on the hardwood floor of their city loft, which they continue to do to this very day.

A number of books have come out in the last few years on caring for a loved one after brain injury: Where is the Mango Princess and Three Dog Life come to mind. Alix Kates Shulman's book is a memoir of caring for her severely brain injured husband, but she goes very far into care giving and we sense that she feels guilt and remorse over her husband's fall from their loft. We don't really get the payoff. She gets to give up much of her life and self to take care of this man, often around the clock. He is verbally and sometimes physically abusive, requires constant care in every part of his intimate physical being and yet, she slogs on. It's never clear, is it love for the man he used to be? Guilt? The continued hope that he will be restored to "normal?" Most readers will shake their head and say, I wouldn't do it. So, why read the book? If you have no particular interest in brain injury? Because Shulman is a really good writer. Reminds me of Didion. Like Didion, lives in the rarified intellectual world of the well to do who don't think they're well to do. The writing though pulls you through, you don't want to put the book down, the flashbacks to her love life with Scott before the injury are utterly compelling. That's my overall description. Damn good writing makes for a compelling read even if the content makes you scratch your head. Whether Shulman is a saint, I don't know. But she's a hell of a writer.

I totally loved Alix Kates Shulman's book. It's a completely gripping love story and involving tale of how a relationship adapts when "for worse" happens. This work makes illuminating and fascinating reading for any person who's married and intends to stay that way: It's proof that there can be romance and satisfaction at any age, in any situation.

I agree with everything the official reviewers above say: It is a beautifully written memoir and a compelling story. It is also a portrait of a loving relationship that will probably make most of us think, "It's a good thing that wasn't me--I don't think I could have adapted the way Alix Shulman did." The author has woven in, especially in the last part of the book, clear explanations of what happens when there is traumatic brain injury (TBI), and works into the story some of the tips she picks up along the way of how to take care of herself and hang on to at least a few hours to herself during each day. This is not presented as a how-to book, but you sure do get a sense of what you have to be prepared to do, and to give up, if something like this fall from a sleeping loft leaves someone in your family handicapped. Among other things, she has to deal with her husband's loss of short-term memory, his around-the-clock emotional dependence on her, and outbursts of anger and aggression that are especially hard to deal with because he was such a gentle person. TO LOVE WHAT IS is a slim and highly readable book, one I would not hesitate to suggest or give to anyone who has to deal with TBI (or to decide how MUCH they love that person they are thinking of marrying).