Customer Reviews

Being with Rachel: A Personal Story of Memory and Survival

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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Brennan's subject is much larger than the aftermath of the tragedy that happened to her daughter. Is her daughter a different person because of her brain injury? Is Brennan, now, becoming a different person because of the way her relationship to her daughter is changing? Brennan worries questions of identity, personality, and the significance of memory with an astonishingly light touch, and she tells a terrific story. You could almost say that Brennan has made good somehow of the tragedy, turned her daughter into an inspiring lesson for all of us--except that Brennan is too smart and too observant of life to be that reductive. Her Rachel is no lesson; she's a treasure and a pain and a person-and-a-half. An often funny, heartening, and inspiring book.

This is a wonderfully touching story of brain injury survival that hasn't been seen much. Instead of from a survivors voice, it's from a parents voice. What a couragous and strong woman Karen is. This book shows you what daily life is like living with a survivor. This story reads alot like my own. I identified with Rachel on a very personal level and put me in touch even more with perhaps what my mother went through with me. This is such good writting that I feel I know Karen and her family personally. And not becuase I have brain injury. Read this book! Even if you don't know brain injury, this can apply to any life altering stuggle people go through.

Honest as it is graceful, lucid as it is lovely. Brennan's book deals with the shades of loss and reconciliation inherent in the land of the "mind" where identity and the "self" that we love when we love a daughter, sister, friend is housed and jeopardized on that accidental and foreign map of the brain trauma, coma, and finally memory loss(es) and gains. Being with Rachel visits that daughter, sister, friend, collaborative relationship that walks and tells and re-tells those stories, shared and re-made, until finally, there are paths carved well-enough that two--mothers, daughters, sisters, friends might walk together. A wonderful read.

This book is a must read for anyone who has had a family member suffer a TBI (traumatic brain injury) and I wish those who don't deal with TBI's to read it so they have an understanding of those who do have one. I have a son who suffered one and even though his wasn't as severe as Rachel's, there were parts of Rachel's problems that he also dealt with.

This book is also a wonderful story that miracles do happen. I think Rachel's mother was the driving force in her recovery.

Great Book

Atop all the courageous acts in this story, the final and most lasting one is Karen Brennan's commitment of her story to print. In her turmoil's depths, she attests to uncomfortable truths and confesses her impassioned dismay that love is sometimes mixed with guilt, that hope is a hairsbreadth from dread, that the cruelest and most unjust penalty is in another light a largesse with unending rewards. Most impressive is the revelatory presentation of an active mind (or perhaps two minds) learning, reformulating, performing. In her new role as caregiver researching her daughter's brain injury, Brennan confronts anew terms she had understood as fiction instructor and critical theorist: reading this, you'll come to know that what you appreciate in your favorite author or in your best friend's letters is your own innate complicity in a good act of perserveration or confabulation or dissociation. The gradual reunderstanding of memory and narrative is a thrill to experience.

Notwithstanding her publisher's marketing strategy, this is far more than a story of survival; and though she may share with Mark Doty or John Bayley a life marked by caregiving and loss, Brennan authors a far finer literary memoir, imaginatively and unsympathetically crafted, with a style more akin to the radical sincerity of J.R. Ackerley or Annie Ernaux or Herve Guibert.

These are your best friend's letters. Karen Brennan is your favorite author.

Karen Brennan is a creative writing professor who pens both fiction and poetry. She crafted this beautifully written, easy-to-read, sometimes disturbing, sometimes humorous book as a way of grieving over her twenty-five-year-old daughter Rachel's brain injury. Rachel's impairments include a severe short-term memory deficit, "outrageous" disinhibition, and extreme mood swings. She's euphoric one moment, filled with rage the next. Being with Rachel is a candid, courageous depiction of the challenges one mother faces caring for her daughter. Karen and Rachel's story is one that will touch all caregivers and validate their feelings of anger, frustration, fatigue, listlessness, guilt, and loneliness. This book is fair warning of the hardships in store for those caregivers who--by choice or necessity--carry 100 percent of the caregiving burden. In Karen's case, her other offspring have lives and children of their own. Rachel's father, long separated from Karen, lives in another state. Friends fill in here and there, for a while, but then fade away. At times, the author simply runs out of gas; she allows lethargy to take over, and Rachel suffers. Sadly, this sounds so familiar to so many caregivers. This book is essential reading for those who care for a survivor with major emotional and behavioral impairments. Time after time, Karen's stories will have you smiling or crying in recognition of a shared responsibility. Karen bravely shares with the reader those sinister thoughts that most caregivers suppress.

Honest and beautifully written memoir of a mother whose daughter sustained a traumatic brain injury. Unsentimental but profoundly moving and often humorous. I admire the author and I wonder if I could be as brave if something as horrible as this happened to my child. Makes you stop and think!

A very interesting memoir. I thought the blend of medical and personal was very good. The author (Rachel's Mom) wrote a very moving memoir.

Karen Brennan's Being With Rachel ... tells of a family's changes when a 25-year-old daughter is gravely injured in a motorcycle accident. Her mother's account of her daughter's slow recovery, determination to walk again, and lasting brain injuries makes for a moving story of rebirth and courage.