Introduction to
A Stitch of Time

I learned to read when I was 27 in a waiting room in a Scottish hospital.

That is a question of context. With aphasia it is always a question of context. When I say I learned to read at age 27, it is true and untrue.  It is deceptive.  I can say the same thing a lot of ways. I can say: I learned to read again at age 27. I can say: A brain aneurysm once robbed me of my abilities to speak, read, and write. I can find a better word to use there instead of robbed.  I can include a transcription instead of a description, using the words I actually wrote when the strange thought occurred to me, that I was learning to read again, as if for the first time:

First novel. I was 27. Clouad of Sparrows. The right first I do read a novel. Tried t try it 3 pages over and over.

Though the transcript might be difficult to read, it might be most appropriate tack because this is what aphasia is: the inability to access words.

On August 23, 2007, an undetected brain aneurysm ruptured while I was performing in Edinburgh, Scotland. When I collapsed onstage, I was an actress, a writer, and a PhD student in New York City.  When I woke up from the emergency surgery, I was a brain patient and an aphasiac.  The aneurysm was located in the Broca’s area, one of the two language centers of the brain, and the rupture rendered me aphasiac, and drastically altered my abilities to use language. 

My memoir, A Stitch Of Time: Diary of an Aphasiac, follows the progress of a mind in construction, recovering and rebuilding language. I kept copious journals from the time I was interned in the Scottish hospital, with roughly 30 workable words, to a time of near fluency a year later.  For a while, I was hardly interested in reading the words I was putting down on the pages of the diary, but after months of journaling and speech therapy, I developed a curious urge to look back to see what I had written.  Initially, I was aghast. And then I was intrigued. I had not realized my case of aphasia had been so severe.  I looked then at the journals with wonder and curiosity, as if I were participating in an improbable archeological dig.  And these moments became the beginnings of the book.

The memoir works chronologically in 13 chapters, from August 2007 to August 2008. This book incorporates a number of documents and artifacts, from journal entries to emails to tape-recorded conversations.  The memoir functions with at least two narrators: The Journal Writer and The Recovered Writer. The Journal Writer documents in real-time, writing her diary entries even during the most severe levels of her impairment. The Recovered Writer is essentially the narrator, who organizes the material of the book, directing the readers' attention to various fragments, moments, ideas—somewhat flexible in her navigation through structural time and space.  She tells the story, the seamstress who stitches the gaps together.