Rating: 4 out of 5

I heard Lauren speak on the Alusionist podcast last year and it made me cry. The thought of losing my language upset me.

The book is moving, and it’s interesting to read the journey of her regaining her language and how the aphasia has affected and continues to affect her.

I always thought that, having had a Mum with dementia, losing my memory was my biggest fear in life. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s losing my language and my ability to communicate. Mum lost both and I wonder if the lack of memory was more bothersome and upsetting to me at certain times in her journey through the illness than it was to her. I think I’d rather not have either happen.

Highlighted passages:

Now that I have this skill back; it feels dangerous too. Because now I have something too precious to lose

Our friendship was based around the language we used together

Whatever I was facing, I didn’t think I was capable of ignoring it, even if I tried. The only was through.

Your first love feels everlasting, until its over. The end of it is shocking because the experience had felt so pure and incorruptible. The second time is different. The concept of permanency is porous because even as you have this magnificent sensation and the variety of sub-sensations that stem from it, you know it all can change. Still, despite the knowledge that this love might end you let it in again, Pain is possible, you know that, but you still want to feel the exhilaration and the tenderness regardless. Hope re-emerges in you. Perhaps you tend to this love differently and find new ways of relishing it. You learn by doing, and as long as you keep learning, you pick up different things the second time. But you still fall. And its still love. And nothing will ever be better than that.

As people we don’t often face one another and explicitly say: you have made an impression on me. My life is different, and better, for knowing you. I hadn’t appreciated the gift of these letters when they had been sent to me initially. It wasn’t that I disliked hearing from people, but at the time, the memories they shared just did not elicit an emotional reaction in me. Later, though, I would come to treasure them

To recall a memory is very often a collaborative event, and you remember different things with different people

If I could die any day, at any time, in any room I was in, I had to make the best of where I was

Memory is what gives us the depth to our experiences; it is the way we prioritise the things we hold dear

We are rarely prepared for the next stages in our lives, and we lurch forward into positions we are not equipped for, without the expertise we might sorely need. With that in mind, perfection can never be the goal. But fluidity might be. And sometimes without exactly realising it, in the process of doing what we are doing, we become the people who are capable of doing it

Originally posted to my Goodreads account