In the Shadow of Memory (review)

On December 7, 1988, forty-seven years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, marathoner, author, and policy analyst Floyd Skloot woke for his morning run and was confounded by his shoelaces. "I . . . sat on the edge of the bed, trying to understand how to make my shoes stay on, since tying the laces was proving impossible. I tried to put my blue wristband over my head. . . . I tried to open the room door by pressing on its hinges" (p. 36). Skloot could not immediately explain or understand his difficulties with thinking or controlling his body. Trespassed by a viral brain infection, his previously ordered life was derailed in a series of agnosias and apraxias, deficits of knowing and doing. In the Shadow of Memory, Skloot's autobiographical collection of essays, raises the curtain on the science, sociology, and personal meanings of his conversion into a brain-damaged man.

Skloot divides In the Shadow of Memory into three sections. In "Gray Area," he baits our voyeuristic urge by exposing his startling limitations. He quickly wins our ear with a vulnerable and gentle humor:

I can be a spectacle. In a music store last fall, I was seeking an instruction booklet for Beverly [Skloot's wife], who wanted to relearn how to play her old recorder. She informed me that there were several kinds of recorders; it was important to buy exactly the right category of book. . . . I made my way up to the counter and nodded when the saleswoman asked what I wanted. Nothing came out of my mouth, but I did manage to gesture over my right shoulder like an umpire signaling an out. I knew I was in trouble but forged ahead anyway, saying, "Where are the books for sombrero reporters?" (P. 7)

Floyd Skloot, our sombrero reporter, searches for the right instrument, while his own damaged recorder and reporter muddle the request. Each essay of "Gray Area" reveals adaptations and meditations on his daily contest with language spills, dyscalculia, spatial imbalance, and emotional lability. Skloot's infection stranded much of his past, his expectations, and his identity—gone was a secure ability to plan, to remember, to rely on his body. His life had become a jumble, myopic at times, vibrant at others, with some advantages nestled among the obvious handicaps: the more closely regarded moment, heightened sensory experiences, and an emotional intensity rendering him "Not loony, but liberated" (p. 22).

Particularly in the first section of the collection, a spectrum of learned references connects with antecedents in literature, philosophy, and science. Skloot nods to Sontag and her famous caution against interpreting illness as metaphor, even as he occasionally indulges. He touches on Shakespeare (though not Milton and his mid-life blindness), Descartes, and neuroscientists from Pinker to Sacks. Sacks's greater achievements as detailed case historian, weaving medicine and literature, are not imitated, but respected from across the examining table. This is the patient's view, brain damaged yet nimbly asserted. Floyd Skloot has found his own voice.

The glassy formal structure of Skloot's writing strikes back at his confusion in its relaxed syntax and uncluttered logic. He admits the irony of the brain-damaged writer, and names his revenge: "I avenge myself on an insult that was meant, it feels, to silence me by compromising my word-finding capacity, my ability to concentrate and remember, to spell or conceptualize, to express myself, to think" (p. 11). Two hundred forty-three pages of disciplined rewrite reveal no structural faults. The virus, researched, documented, and of course nonsentient, makes an unsatisfying target. Instead, he directs his resolve inward, like acid on a lexicon scrubbed of any formal evidence of disability. He rejects opportunities for a fractured or dysmetric narrative to convey his experience; this is a memoir, not Joycean fiction. Examples when language has failed him are framed with quotation marks, set apart in a style that strives for...