Teaser Tuesdays -- Left Neglected by Lisa Genova

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by MizB @ Should Be Reading. To participate, all you have to do is the following:

• Grab your current/upcoming read
• Open to a random page
• Share 2-3 "teaser" sentences from somewhere on that page
• Be careful not to include spoilers!

We both laugh.I like the sound of my mother's laugh.  I wish she'd found those pills when I was a kid, that I wasn't learning the sound at the age of thirty-seven and at the price of a traumatic brain injury.

~page 231, Left Neglected by Lisa Genova

So.  I adored Still Alice, Lisa Genova's first (and bestselling) novel.  Adored it.  This one, I struggled with -- largely, I think, due to my total disconnect from Sarah, the main character.  I'm not competitive or Type A and I think lying to your kids is not cool -- for starters.  But I'm fascinated by the idea of left neglect, a neurological syndrome that sometimes happens after a traumatic brain injury.  After Sarah's car accident, she loses all awareness of the left side -- of her body, of her plate, of a page in a book.  Also, I appreciated the changes that came about in Sarah's relationship with her mother, as well as with the world at large.  (And I'm glad that she decided using a cell phone while driving is a bad idea -- I wasn't sure that was going to come.)  In fact, the end of the book has enough positive messages that I need to hear right now -- that one can make a new life and be happy, that hope and contentment exist, that opportunities arise, that it probably erases my issues at the beginning.  Sarah's character is redeemed, for me, by the "new" Sarah she becomes. 

As a side note, she celebrates the anniversary of surviving her car crash just like I do with my accident.  I love it.  And it makes me wonder -- perhaps there are more good things to come as a result of my accident, things that I'm not yet aware of.