About the Book
In December 1988, Floyd Skloot was stricken by a virus that targeted his brain. The resulting damage left him totally disabled and utterly changed. "In the Shadow of Memory" is a candid memoir of living with a brain and a mind that have suddenly been shattered - an intimate picture of what it is like to find oneself possessed of a ravaged memory, unstable balance, and wholesale changes in both cognitive and emotional powers. But the book is more than an account of catastrophic metamorphosis. Skloot also explores the gradual reassembling of himself, putting together his scattered memories, rediscovering the meaning of childhood and family history, learning a new way to be at home in the world. Combining the author's skills as a poet and novelist, this book finds humor, meaning, and hope in the story of a fragmented life made whole by love and the courage to thrive. Floyd Skloot is the author of three novels, four collections of poetry, and a collection of essays, "The Night Side". Individual essays from "In the Shadow of Memory" have been included in the anthologies "The Best American Essays", "The Art of the Essay 1999", and "The Best American Science Writing 2000".
The essay "A Measure of Acceptance" won the 2002 Shipley Award from Creative Nonfiction magazine.
About the Author :
Floyd Skloot is the author of three novels, four collections of poetry, and a collection of essays, The Night Side. Individual essays from In the Shadow of Memory have been included in the anthologies The Best American Essays, The Art of the Essay 1999, and The Best American Science Writing 2000. The essay "A Measure of Acceptance" won the 2004 Pushcart Prize.
Review :
"Floyd Skloot is not simply one of the wisest, wryest, and most interesting essayists I've ever read, he is also among the funniest. In the Shadow of Memory taught me as much about myself and my brain as it did about Skloot's battle to regain a semblance of the life he once led. It's a tale that is honest, insightful, and--in the end--profoundly moving."--Chris Bohjalian, author of The Buffalo Soldier and Midwives" "Penetrating, eloquent, witty, and luminous. I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human."--James Gleick, author of Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything" "Over the past decade, Floyd Skloot has developed into one of the finest essayists we have. His strong, subtle, exquisitely truthful and often very funny writing testifies to an impressive humanity and maturity. In the Shadow of Memory is Skloot's best book, and can stand comparison with any personal essay collection by anyone in recent years."--Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body" "Drawing on personal experience and scientific research, Skloot provides fascinating insights into the nature and basis of human experience."--Daniel Schacter, Chair of Psychology, Harvard University, and author of Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past" "Floyd Skloot tells his edgy, tense, harrowing story in prose graceful and lyrical, compelling and funny. The end result--especially since Skloot is utterly unpretentious--is wisdom literature that's like a cross between the Book of Job and Rumi. It's also one of the funniest books I've read in years."--Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America" "In the Shadow of Memory opens a window into a world of shattering confusion and mysterious transformation that most people can never comprehend. It is powerful, horrifying, and ultimately enlightening for both writer and reader."--Lee Gutkind, editor and founder of Creative Nonfiction magazine." "In this remarkable collection of essays, part of the American Lives series (edited by TobiasWolff), Skloot (The Night Side) conveys what it is like to live with a damaged brain... This isan unusual and engrossing memoir written with intelligence, honesty, perception and humor." Publishers Weekly February 24, 2003" "This exquisite collection of personal essays tells the story of how, in December 1988, a virus found its way in to the brain of poet and novelist Skloot and reengineered his mind... The author's extraordinary story of learning to live with who he has become, of struggling to know himself despite an impaired memory and of reestablishing a relationship with language and with the people of his often harrowing past, forms the core of this book. Reading Skloot, we learn about the science of the brain and the resourcefulness of the heart. Book Magazine March/April 2003" "What will amaze readers ... is the poise?and even humor?with which Skloot turns personal catastrophe into literary reflection... Perhaps because so many of his memories have vanished into the black hole of disease, Skloot unfolds each of his remaining recollections as fragments of a precious mosaic of meaning. A remarkable literary achievement. The March 15, 2003 issue of Booklist" "In the Shadow of Memory is part of the fine American Lives Series from the University of Nebraska Press, which publishes memoirs selected by Tobias Wolff, the author of the classic This Boy's Life. ..." "[A] collection of measured, lucid, often funny essays cataloging [Skloot's] own dementia. March 27, 2003, issue of the San Francisco Chronicle" "Bracingly triumphant... [Skloot] is a master of the genre, deftly " "incorporating neuroscience and autobiography, vivid detail and hard-won " emotional truth. His early years in Brooklyn and Long Beach--where his self-dramatizing mother hogs the stage--are evoked with novelistic precision. Little wonder that his pieces regularly turn up in anthologies "of the year's best essays...Think of In the Shadow of Memory as an Oliver Sacks work written from the inside out, the neurological " "patient as narrator of his own condition." The Skloot memoir is the latest volume in the splendid American Lives Series from the University of Nebraska Press. I highly recommend another. "Dip into Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps by poet-essayist Ted Kooser for its eloquent meditations on country pleasures, the rhythms of the seasons and the lingering presence of Czech " "folk culture in rural Nebraska." March 27, 2003, issue of Newsday" "A poignant memoir of his experience with virally induced brain damage...Skloot's gemlike essays strive to make sense of this experience...Never self-indulgent, the book is a clear-eyed investigation into our powers of recall, especially as they relate to painful familial pasts, and a look at how we never stop trying to make something transcendent of our disturbing memories...With this searing honesty, Skloot's essays add up to a profoundly moving tale of emotion triumphing over the analytical, of the importance of accepting family shortcomings rather than trying to rewrite the past. The world Skloot delineates is one in which brain damage, like troubled family histories, offers backhanded kinds of blessings---blessings he nonetheless celebrates with refreshing candor. April 8, 2003, Los Angeles Times" "Skloot has created a luminous yet brutally candid memoir. From its uppercut of an opening sentence---'I used to be able to think'---through the author's careful, scrupulously non-self-pitying catalogue of his mental deficits and on to a chronicle of his early family life that makes you smile even while it's breaking your heart, this book possesses a gravity and immensity that belie its brief length...Skloot's descriptions are poetic but precise...[His] sentences ... crackle with exact portraiture...The glory of Skloot's prose is that, even when it is lush and seemingly digressive, it is ruggedly specific. No detail is deployed for any other reason except to make a picture clearer, an idea richer, an emotion more vivid...Because of" "his brain injury, 'I have been rewoven,' Skloot writes. 'I have been resouled.' Those insights are not available in textbooks or seminars. And they grace this powerful and anguished book, this elegy to a lost mind." Chicago Tribune, May 25, 2003
