A mother reflects on the aftermath of her son’s traumatic brain injury in this unflinching portrait of loss, love, and the pitfalls of modern medicine.“Like The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion . . . a spare, sharp memoir about the speed with which a comfortable existence can be blighted by grief.” —The Sunday TimesWhen Lu Spinney’s 29-year-old son, Miles, flies up on his snowboard, he lands hard on the ice and fall...

Aged 29, Lu Spinney's son Miles suffered a devastating head injury and was left in a coma. With unflinching honesty, Lu Spinney has written a passionate, urgent account of the years following her son Miles's accident, revealing his existence imprisoned in a limbo of fluctuating consciousness, at times agonizingly aware of his predicament.With unfailing honesty and courageous prose, Lu Spinney's memoir explores the very nature of self and the anguish of witnessing Miles's suffering a...

When Lu Spinney’s twenty-nine-year-old son, Miles, flies up on his snowboard, “he knows he is not in control as he is taken by force up the ramp,” writes his mother, “skewing sideways as his board clips the edge and then he is hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky ahead…” He lands hard on the ice and falls into a coma.Thus begins the erratic loss—Miles first in a coma and then trapped in a fluctuating state of minimal consciousness—that unravels over the next five years....