A Wordless Writer: Samina Ali on How Writing a Memoir Helped Her Brain Trauma Heal

Last week, I received an email from a former writing student, telling me that he was reading my novel—something he should have done “months ago.” Andrew is one of the most talented writers I’ve taught, someone who will be scooped up by a publishing house the moment he finishes his novel.

I was mortified. My novel was published in the U.S. two decades earlier, in 2004, and I emailed Andrew immediately to confide that I had been young and untalented when I wrote it—”not,” I added, “that I am talented now that I am old.” It was my way of politely nudging him to stop reading it.

Instead he sent a reply that was straight out of a writer’s dream. He detailed exactly what he appreciated about the narrative, quoted sentences that struck him as beautiful, then ended by saying, “I also like how this story is straddling two different cultures/worlds. It’s particularly apt for me, since I’ve been going through a lot of that the past year too. So for me, there’s a lot to relate to in this story.”

That a white man with a wife and kids could identify with a nineteen-year-old Indian protagonist meant that I had somehow accomplished what every writer strives for and broken through barriers to allow readers to identify with my heroine. But I couldn’t take the win. Instead, I went with the familiar voice inside me saying what it did every time someone told me they were reading my novel: how can I make them stop?

In 1999, when I was twenty-nine years old, I was in the midst of writing my novel when I became pregnant with my son. The delivery didn’t go well. Twenty minutes after my son was born, I experienced a grand mal seizure that cut off oxygen to my brain for thirty seconds.

I landed in the neuro-ICU with two brain hemorrhages. I also had kidney failure. Liver failure. Heart damage. Pulmonary edema. Single-digit blood platelet count. Blood that had stopped clotting. Such severe brain swelling that the soft outer ridges were pushing up against the hard inside of my skull and the doctors were planning to drill a hole in my skull to relieve the excess fluid.

One neurologist told my family that if I was lucky, I would die. If not, I’d end up in a vegetative state.

That I survived was a miracle. Still, the damage from the strokes had left me disabled. If I wanted to, I couldn’t stand by myself and walk from my bed to the bathroom let alone take a shower, brush my teeth or sit on the toilet in privacy. Right eye blindness, amnesia and short-term memory loss, breast milk so full of toxins it had to be pumped and thrown away.

I was also dealing with severe aphasia; I had gaps in my language and could not speak properly. I was no longer a writer and a thinker. I had lost those abilities—not just my words but my higher mental processes to imagine, to plan, to create, to reason, those very functions that we take for granted. Those very functions that make us human.

Life as I knew it was over. Not one doctor provided referrals to speech or physical therapists. I was warned that I’d never write again, much less be able to process thought. Although I was now a mother, I was as helpless as my newborn.

During those early months of convalescence, I sank into depression. Without my higher cognitive functions, I was overrun with raw emotions. I was convinced I was a burden on my husband and parents. I was convinced my body had betrayed me.

I’d gone into the hospital to have a baby: I came home disabled. I blamed the doctors for their reckless care, their refusal to step in even when it was clear during the delivery that my body was imploding. I blamed racism. I blamed the world. I was angry and bitter. My damaged brain had reduced me to my primal self.

And, yet, beneath the anger and grief was an undeniable, inexplicable creative urge to write. To produce. To give birth a second time.

Over the next four years, I pushed myself to do the work. At first, the act of forcing my brain to put words together brought on debilitating headaches. I wrote through the pain until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Then I’d swivel my chair around, away from the desk, and simply let my body fall to the ground. There I’d lie, curled up, my arms wrapped around my head, my eyes squeezed shut.

On bad days, I hit my limit in under five minutes and would let myself fall to the ground. Good days, I had ten minutes before being assaulted by the headache.

It became clear to me that the doctors were right. The aphasia didn’t just scramble words when I spoke. I couldn’t type the words I was thinking either. Other words would appear on the screen. Random, unintended words: ice skates instead of India, peaches instead of rain.

Worse: there were times when my brain was too impaired to grasp that the words I was stringing together, sentences that I could see right in front of me on the computer screen, were nothing more than pure nonsense. On occasion, the words weren’t even actual words. Just letters smashed together.

I told myself it didn’t matter, none of it, not the reality that the sentences weren’t making sense, and not that, even on my best days, I wasn’t able to function for over fifteen minutes. I didn’t let anything stop me. I struggled forward, too scared to acknowledge that life as I knew it was over.

All of this is what comes back to me when Andrew writes to me. My anguish. My lonely and desperate struggles at rehabilitation. This suffering is all there, wrapped up in the narrative.

How do we measure our healing? In truth, writing my novel saved my life. Even though I didn’t know it going in, the repetitive process of working on a story based on my personal experience forced my brain to excavate memories, to imagine a trajectory for a future through planning and plotting, to correctly match the words I was typing/speaking with those I was thinking.

In this way, for months and then for years, each day that I sat at the computer, I forced my brain to create new connections between brain cells, called neural pathways. These pathways branched out to connect cells that weren’t connected before and this new wiring in my brain helped me regain many of my functions.

While I may never be who I once was (more than twenty years on, words appear on the page that I don’t intend, I have gaps in my memory, and I suffer daily from minor cognitive deficits), I nonetheless consider myself physically restored.

And yet I’ve abandoned the very thing that saved me. These past two decades since my novel’s publication, I’ve not once read it myself. In fact, my book tour became more of an “apology tour,” where instead of promoting the novel, I found myself explaining that I’d written it while recovering.

When the publicity came to an end, I left writing altogether. I went on to curate a global exhibition. I gave a TEDx talk that went viral. I divorced then remarried. I gave birth a second time to a daughter. Throughout all that, whenever I thought about writing another book, I saw myself lying in a fetal position on the ground next to my desk.

If I was ever going to write again, I knew I had to get back down on that ground. I’d have to endure the agony and loss in a way that I hadn’t allowed myself back when I was rehabilitating. To feel the weight of my torment then would have stopped me in my tracks. Writing my novel might have rewired my brain, but it hadn’t healed me.

It was only after I successfully raised my son into an adult and launched him out into the world to begin a life of his own that I felt ready to take on that dark period right after his birth. It wasn’t easy to lie back down on the ground, to be twenty-nine years old again and unable to care for myself and my newborn.

But slowly, a memoir of those days emerged. The chapters fragmented. The narrative design of the book mirrored my disconnected neurons.

When I got to the end of the memoir, I realized the story I’d written wasn’t the one I’d intended to write. I hadn’t just written a story about my survival, not really. What emerged as well was a full-throated love letter to the vital act of storytelling.

It’s narrative that allowed me to recover my memories and rebuild my brain. It’s narrative that gave me faith to hold on when it seemed there was nothing left to hold onto. It’s narrative that forms the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are capable of.

Writing about my novel is the closest I’ll get to my novel. I still can’t get myself to read it. It sits on my bookshelf just as it has for the past twenty years. For now, this is enough.

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Pieces You’ll Never Get Back: A Memoir of Unlikely Survival by Samina Ali is available via Catapult.