Annie Liontas

For readers of Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom , Esme Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias , and Melissa Febos’s Girlhood , a powerful and deeply personal memoir in essays that sheds light on the silent epidemic of head trauma. Annie Liontas suffered multiple concussions in her thirties. In Sex with a Brain Injury , she writes about what it means to be one of the “walking wounded,” facing her fear, her rage, her physical suffering, and the effects of head trauma on her marriage and other relationships. Forced to reckon with her own queer mother’s battle with addiction, Liontas 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. Encountering Liontas’s sharp, affecting prose, the reader 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 astonishing and compassionate narrative offers insight and hope in equal measure.

Let Me Explain You begins with a letter: Stavros Stavros Mavrakis- Greek immigrant, proud owner of the Gala Diner, having had a premonition of death and believing he has just ten days left to live, sends an email to his estranged ex-wife and three grown daughters in which he lays out his last wishes for each of them. He then sets about preparing for his final hours. With varying degrees of laughter and scorn, his family and friends dismiss his behavior as nothing more than a plea for attention, a mid-life crisis of sorts, but when Stavros disappears without explanation, those closest to him-particularly his eldest daughters Stavroula and Litza- are forced to confront the possibility of his death and the realities of their loss.