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Sex with a Brain Injury

On Concussion and Recovery

Annie Liontas

$49.99

Hardback

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English
Scribner
17 July 2024
Winner of the Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award

This powerful and deeply personal memoir in essays “reflects on history, philosophy, and love while living with head trauma” (The New York Times Book Review).

“An infuriatingly gorgeous, important book.” —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
* “A riveting book about embodiment, pain, identity, and intimacy…this book is a stunning achievement.” —Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

After suffering multiple concussions in her thirties, Annie Liontas shares what it means to be one of the “walking wounded” in Sex with a Brain Injury. Facing her fear, her rage, her physical suffering, and the effects of head trauma on her marriage and other relationships, Liontas is forced to reckon with her own queer mother’s battle with addiction and finds echoes in their pain. Liontas weaves history, philosophy, and personal accounts to interrogate and expand representations of mental health, ability, and disability—particularly in relation to women and the LGBT community. She uncovers the surprising legacy of brain injury, examining its role in culture, the criminal justice system, and through historical figures like Henry VIII and Harriet Tubman. Through Liontas’s sharp, affecting prose, we can imagine this kind of pain, and having to claw one’s way back to a new normal. The hidden gift of injury, Liontas writes, is the ability to connect with others.

For the millions of people who have suffered from concussions and for those who have endeavored to support loved ones through the painful and often baffling experience of head trauma, this intimate memoir of a profound affliction and resilience…stands as testimony to love and patience” (Kirkus Reviews).
By:  
Imprint:   Scribner
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 213mm,  Width: 140mm,  Spine: 25mm
Weight:   404g
ISBN:   9781668015544
ISBN 10:   1668015544
Pages:   304
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Annie Liontas is the genderqueer author of the novel Let Me Explain You and the coeditor of A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Gay Magazine, NPR, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Believer, Guernica, McSweeney’s, and other publications. A graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program, she is a professor of writing at George Washington University. Annie has served as a mentor for Pen City’s incarcerated writers and helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system. She lives in Philadelphia.

Reviews for Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery

"""An intimate memoir of a profound affliction and resilience...Liontas offers frank reflections on the physical, emotional, and cognitive consequences of her injuries...stands as testimony to love and patience."" --Kirkus ""This is an infuriatingly gorgeous, important book and Liontas is a singular writer."" --Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties ""I'm in awe of Annie Liontas's Sex with a Brain Injury for a hundred reasons, not the least of which is its resistance to abstract language, which is another way to say its commitment to writing through the immediacy of sinew, nerve, blood, and bone. On top of that it's funny, tender, hopeful, and disarmingly intimate with a charisma so bright it leaves sparks flying in its wake. In short, a classic."" --Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World ""In Sex with a Brain Injury Annie Liontas has written a guidebook to falling back in love with the unruly body. Liontas renders the intimacy and terror of life after brain injury in rapturous prose, cracking open their own story and those of others who live with invisible, often disbelieved suffering. Yet amid the pain, Liontas excavates moments of bodily delight so sensual they gave me goosebumps. This book is a revelation, a cold compress on anything that aches--the mind, certainly, but also the heart and soul. A sensational read."" --Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches ""Sex with a Brain Injury succeeds in extraordinary, unfamiliar ways. Memories are rendered like snapshots--vivid, sharply and wonderfully strange, full of voids; pieced together, they form a tapestry of questions: what does true intimacy look like? What are the margins of illness, and how, too, is illness spacious, illuminating? With the chorus of other writers, scholars, and myriad artistic sources, Annie Liontas turns these questions over like a stone in their hand; multi-faceted, full of nuance, dazzling. Delightfully weaving humor with horror, Liontas brilliantly articulates what it is like to reach for cohesion, linearity, sense, and how it feels to do so with pleasure. An unforgettable read."" --T Kira Mahealani Madden ""A most extraordinary lesson in compassion... Annie Liontas has captured the truths known mostly to survivors of brain injury. Hers is a visceral, bracing account of the aftermath of injury and the war she fought to make meaning of suffering and reclaim her life. People with any manner of invisible health conditions will see themselves in and through Annie's writing; people who have been dismissed, discounted, or degraded by the systems of care that should have offered relief. A celebration of the complexities of vulnerability, this book is required reading for everyone with a brain, injured or otherwise. A triumph."" --Dr. Kim Gorgens, neuropsychologist & TED Speaker"


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