A
memoir of amnesia is a paradox. To write an autobiography, one must be
able to consult one’s past. But what happens when that history is
obliterated? The experience of such loss and the hard-won reclamation of
identity form the bases of two new books. One is by a young man whose
amnesia was a side effect of a prescribed medication. The other is by a
young woman who sustained a devastating head wound.
On
Oct. 17, 2002, David Stuart MacLean, an American graduate student on a
Fulbright fellowship, wandered dazed and frightened on a train platform
in Hyderabad, India. “I couldn’t even think of what name would have been
on a passport if I had one or what foreign country I was currently in,”
he writes. A police officer helped get him to a hospital, where he was
treated for psychosis. Only after being discharged did he learn that he
was suffering from a disastrous reaction to the anti-malaria pill
Lariam.
Most
people can take the medication without a problem, but some experience
disturbing nightmares or depression. MacLean, however, suffered weeks
of persecutory delusions, hallucinations and bizarre sensory
distortions. “The Answer to the Riddle Is Me” is his vivid reflection on
the 10 years following the Lariam-induced break with reality and the
memory problems that persisted in its wake.
Thankfully,
the author could take in and store new information, but his cache of
pre-Larium memories was depleted for many months. There were a handful
of exceptions: When his frantic parents rushed to his bedside in India
from their home in Ohio, he knew who they were. “Some motor in my brain
spun and sparked a blue arc of electricity between two exiled neurons
and pow: recognition. . . . They were my parents. They looked like
hell.”
For
the most part, though, MacLean reconstituted himself by interviewing
family and friends about his former self. He learned that he had a
reputation as being tightly wound and that he loved practical jokes. He
was a D.J. in college. (“There was a crazy person bellowing and talking
nonsense between the songs,” he observed as he listened to himself on a
tape of one of his old radio shows.) He found photos of himself and
mimicked his own poses. Not until he read his Fulbright application did
he learn what his own research project was about: the grammar of local
Indian populations when they spoke English.
He
strove to fit in. “I let the other person lead the conversation, and I
agreed with whatever was said,” he writes. “It was like having a
conversation when your face is full of new stitches and you have to be
careful not to split any of them with your emotions. I was a newly
stitched together doll myself and thanks to the Oleanz and Ativan, full
of cotton batting.”
The
book comprises short chapters of one to several pages, presumably to
reflect the staccato-like manner in which memories returned. Swaths of
cultural and biological history of malaria are woven throughout. Lariam,
we learn, was developed by the American Army in the 1970s; concerns
about its safety arose in the 1990s after reports emerged about
unprovoked violence and suicides among servicemen.
MacLean
ends on a redemptive note. One day he and his girlfriend came upon a
motorcycle accident. As he rushed to help, he recalled how generous
local people took care of him when he lost himself in a train station on
the other side of the world. “In the chaos of the world, where we carom
and collide in the everyday turbulence,” he writes, “there’s something
about the specific gravity of the helpless individual, the lost and the
fractured, that draws kindness from us, like venom from a wound.”
Unlike
MacLean, who spent years trying to reclaim his former self, Su Meck,
who was 22 when she was hit by a kitchen fan that fell from her ceiling,
has spent the last two decades trying to inhabit a completely new
person. Her near-fatal head wound led to complete retrograde amnesia —
all her memories had been permanently wiped. For some time after the
accident, she also suffered from anterograde amnesia, the inability to
form new memories.
Her
understated book, “I Forgot to Remember,” is more an account than a
memoir. The matter-of-fact delivery makes the harrowing details of her
ordeal stand out all the more.
Incredibly,
doctors and rehab therapists pronounced Meck fit to leave the hospital
after three weeks even though she did not recognize her two young sons
and the man, Jim, who called himself her husband. (“Jim was assigned to
me,” she writes. “I never really had a say.”) She returned to her house
in Fort Worth, Tex., but it could have belonged to a stranger. In a
sense, it did. “I was born into a life already in progress,” she says.
Meck
had to relearn everything, starting with how to tie her shoes — a
lesson from her preschooler. As her boys learned to read, tell time,
draw letters, add and subtract, so did she. She studied other people
intently so she could mimic their behavior. Upon discovering she would
be a mother again her reaction was: “Gross! There is someone living and
growing inside of me!”
In
her early 40s, at the urging of relatives, Meck enrolled in college.
She doubted her ability to read and write well enough, but her
remarkable grit enabled her to obtain an associate degree in music, and
she is working on a bachelor’s degree. “For years, I had nothing to long
for,” she writes. “I had no neglected hobbies, no dormant talents, no
dreams that I knew about. I existed for the sole purpose of serving my
husband and children.”
Her
universe has now expanded to serving others. Meck expressly wrote the
book to show what traumatic brain injury is like. Her message to
families is to be patient and to maintain realistic expectations, and
never to accuse the injured person of faking symptoms or being
intentionally difficult, as she was by her husband and, appallingly, her
doctors. Despite her obvious and devastating neurological symptoms,
specialists wondered if she was imagining everything because they could
find nothing wrong on her brain scans (imaging techniques are more
refined today).
Meck
winces at the thought of other head injury patients who received such
bogus diagnoses but, unlike her, simply gave up. As for her husband, had
Jim Meck been better informed of his wife’s limitations, perhaps he
would have been more supportive and less inclined to take refuge, as she
says he did for years, in a double life of strippers and mounting debt.
Both
books are tales of triumph in the search for identity. But there are
striking differences as well — MacLean slowly regained his memories and
original self. Meck, in comparison, was shattered; she had to etch a
life onto an entirely new slate. MacLean was surrounded by supportive
souls. Meck was abandoned, clinically and emotionally. One author, a
writer by trade, tells his story because it is a good one: dramatic and
unique. The other tells a story, no less arresting, because she has a
point to make. Both succeed impressively.
THE ANSWER TO THE RIDDLE IS ME
A Memoir of Amnesia
By David Stuart MacLean
Illustrated. 292 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $25.
I FORGOT TO REMEMBER
A Memoir of Amnesia
By Su Meck with Daniel de Visé
280 pp. Simon & Schuster. $25.
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