BookView Review

A middle-aged man’s ordinary life is ruptured by sudden neurological collapse in this searching, intimate memoir of illness and altered consciousness. 

Bosscha recounts his experience with encephalopathy by reconstructing what he cannot remember. The narrative begins with a familiar scene—home renovation, routine independence—before seizures and confusion pull him into a prolonged hospitalization marked by misdiagnosis, restraint, and cognitive erosion. 

As his sense of time, place, and self dissolves, the book assembles itself from two parallel sources: meticulous hospital records and the author’s remembered encephalopathic dreams. These dreams form the emotional core of the memoir. Bosscha renders them as coherent, lived worlds—he is a fighter preparing for a Muay Thai tournament, a husband and father navigating domestic tension in Japan—episodes that feel purposeful and internally logical even as his waking body lies confused and immobilized. The stark contrast between these rich inner narratives and the clinical notes that describe agitation, incontinence, and disorientation unravels the distance between patient experience and institutional perception. Bosscha writes with a controlled, unadorned style that is most effective in passages examining the fragmentation of self—before illness, during hospitalization, within the dream state, and after survival. His recovery resists sentimentality; progress is incremental, and what is lost is neither minimized nor reclaimed.

An absorbing, humane account of neurological illness that brings rare visibility to an interior world most patients cannot articulate.

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