Being with Rachel (review)

A general rule of thumb for seekers of quality nonfiction: When the publisher of a memoir markets a book with a pithily heartwarming subtitle, run, don't walk, from the book display at your local bookstore. An exception to this rule is Being with Rachel, Karen Brennan's account of her daughter's motorcycle accident that resulted in severe brain injury and damage to Rachel's short-term memory. Though burdened with the unctuous subtitle "A Story of Memory and Survival," Brennan's story has no truck with the familiar clichés and platitudes about triumph over adversity. Instead, Brennan's dramatic story of her daughter's accident and long recovery is as much a philosophical inquiry into the nature of self as it is a heartrending story of struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds.

If the self arises out of the way we perceive combined with the way we store these perceptions in memory, Brennan asks, what happens if the ability to perceive and remember in a particular way is radically altered? Can we say that the entity we call a self remains? Or does a new self arise? These are heady questions. But Brennan's method, far from being mired in abstraction, is anecdotal and at times hysterically funny in its recognition of the absurdity of what philosophers call "the human condition." It's one thing, after all, to ponder the nature of the self while poring over Descartes' Meditations in the contemplative calm of one's study. It's another thing altogether to spend the majority of your waking hours with a wisecracking adult daughter who speaks fluent Spanish but can't give a reliable account of the previous day's events.

Brennan's daily interactions with Rachel's caregivers in the medical community pose uncomfortable questions for her about who her daughter is in the aftermath of her injury. One day, when Rachel undergoes a battery of tests to determine her vocabulary skills, she gives "quirky, 'nonstandard' comebacks" to the questions posed by the clinician. When asked to name an article of clothing and a red fruit, Rachel supplies "earmuffs" and "pomegranate." Though Brennan knows that Rachel's sensibilities tended toward the unconventional and ironic before her injury, she fails to convince the medical staff that her daughter's responses are consistent with her daughter's pre-injury personality. So while Brennan interprets Rachel's responses as encouraging reminders of "the old Rachel," the clinicians read Rachel's nonstandard responses as simply another indication of the extent of her brain damage. Thus, Brennan's inquiry about the nature of the self expands to encompass another great philosophical debate: "What is normal?" she asks. "My daughter is most assuredly not normal. Was she ever normal? Was I? When does the 'not' become 'ab'?"

Ultimately, though, Brennan accepts the futility in debating with doctors about whether or not Rachel's responses to vocabulary tests are normal. Unlike the clinicians, who have only to diagnose and treat Rachel, Brennan loves her daughter and has to live with and care for her. With a mordant sensibility that recalls Primo Levi's account of the years he spent in a World War II concentration camp, Survival in Auschwitz, Brennan immerses us in the quixotic drama of Rachel's daily existence. To be consigned to live without a short-term memory in a world predicated on the possession of one is a cruelly ludicrous enterprise. This is true both for Rachel who, as her recovery progresses, gets in the habit of striking out on her own, and for Brennan, who becomes justifiably worried when Rachel vanishes for long stretches of time. When Rachel returns from an outing unable to recount her day's activities, Brennan refrains from getting angry and makes a joke instead: "We made up a phrase that might have been a title for something, if only we knew what its content was: The Secret...