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A Memoir of Unlikely Survival
by Samina Ali
A life-altering neurological disorder. A traumatic birth. An unlikely survival. Pieces You'll Never Get Back is a harrowing and redemptive memoir, in which a new mother must reconstruct her shattered mind, her relationship to her religious upbringing, and her life's purpose.
At 29, as a young writer working on her first novel, Samina Ali nearly died giving birth to her son. Miraculously, she survived the unchecked eclampsia that had endangered her pregnancy, instead sustaining major brain injury and falling into a coma as she gave birth. When she woke up, only her deepest memories were intact. Her husband was a stranger to her, she didn't remember having a baby, and any language other than her native Urdu was foreign. Medical consensus was she would never recover—much less write—again.
Advised to think of her brain as a shattered puzzle, Ali began the long and difficult journey of piecing herself back together: learning to walk, speak, and accomplish basic human tasks alongside her newborn. She attempted to reckon with her past identity as a writer and a wife, and her new identity as a mother. Despite her miraculous survival, the disconnect between the old and the new self was devastating. It would be three years before she felt remotely normal, and seven before she was mended and could fully connect with her son.
Ali pairs the story of her "death" and recovery with the parallel narrative of her relationship to her Islamic upbringing and her fluctuating connection to her faith, incorporating meditations on religious narratives of death, the afterlife, resurrection, and reincarnation. Both deeply personal and steeped in religious thought, Pieces You'll Never Get Back is a uniquely propulsive, searching, and ultimately, inspiring work of memoir.
"Poignant...Heartbreaking yet hopeful, Pieces You'll Never Get Back embodies a woman full of grit and the determination to rediscover herself and heal from inconceivable damage." —Booklist (starred review)
"A unique record of what it is like to lose everything we think of as ourselves, and to painstakingly reclaim it." —Kirkus Reviews
"In this vivid and visceral tale of a childbirth gone unimaginably wrong, what rivets most is the author's fierce and enduring will to make herself whole by writing her story. A triumph." —Amy Irvine, author of Trespass and Desert Cabal
"In Pieces You'll Never Get Back, Samina Ali weaves a deeply moving story of resilience, spirituality, and the bonds that unite us across faiths and cultures. It is both a call for greater awareness of maternal health and a celebration of our shared humanity. A powerful testament to hope." —Reza Aslan, author of An American Martyr in Persia
This information about Pieces You'll Never Get Back was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Samina Ali is the author of Madras on Rainy Days, which won the French Prix Premier Roman Etranger Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction. She is also a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She is a public speaker, and her Tedx talk, "What the Qur'an Really Says About the Hijab," currently has over 8 million views. Her writing has been featured in various outlets, from national NPR to The Economist.
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