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Beauty in the Broken Places
A Memoir of Love, Faith, and Resilience
“In this emotional tale, a young couple see their lives changed in the blink of an eye—and learn to find love again.”—US Weekly
Five months pregnant, on a flight to their “babymoon,” Allison Pataki turned to her husband when he asked if his eye looked strange and watched him suddenly lose consciousness. After an emergency landing, she discovered that Dave—a healthy thirty-year-old athlete and surgical resident—had suffered a rare and life-threatening stroke. Next thing Allison knew, she was sitting alone in the ER in Fargo, North Dakota, waiting to hear if her husband would survive the night.
When Dave woke up, he could not carry memories from hour to hour, much less from one day to the next. Allison had lost the Dave she knew and loved when he lost consciousness on the plane. Within a few months, she found herself caring for both a newborn and a sick husband, struggling with the fear of what was to come.
As a way to make sense of the pain and chaos of their new reality, Allison started to write daily letters to Dave. Not only would she work to make sense of the unfathomable experiences unfolding around her, but her letters would provide Dave with the memories he could not make on his own. She was writing to preserve their past, protect their present, and fight for their future. Those letters became the foundation of this beautiful, intimate memoir. And in the process, she fell in love with her husband all over again.
This is a manifesto for living, an ultimately uplifting story about the transformative power of faith and resilience. It’s a tale of a man’s turbulent road to recovery, the shifting nature of marriage, and the struggle of loving through pain and finding joy in the broken places.
Praise for Beauty in the Broken Places
“Bold and commendable . . . A strength of this memoir is [Allison Pataki’s] scrupulous honesty.”—USA Today
“A memoir about . . . determination and gratitude, and the value of putting one foot in front of another during a crisis.”—The Washington Post
“Heart-wrenching.”—Women’s Health
“Powerful and immersive . . . Pataki delivers an insightful look at how two people faced a life-altering test as a team ‘fighting to make the dreams of our future possible.’”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 1, 2018 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780399591662
- File size: 16969 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780399591662
- File size: 16969 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Kirkus
March 1, 2018
A bestselling historical novelist's account of how she survived the harrowing year following her young husband's unexpected stroke.Pataki (Sisi, Empress on Her Own, 2016, etc.) and her husband, David Levy, were a charmed pair. Intelligent and privileged, both attended Yale University, where they first met as freshmen in 2003. David initially struck the author as a "self-involved, beer-swilling jock." Over time, however, it became clear that he was not only athletic, but also brilliant and everything that Pataki could ever hope for in a man. Their fairy-tale courtship survived college and a transition to New York, where the author focused on building a career in journalism and David, on building one in medicine. The pair married eight years after they met in a ceremony that, like so much of their relationship, "went off without a hitch." They moved to Chicago, where Pataki made an extremely successful transition into fiction writing while her husband began the grueling years of his residency at Rush University. In 2015, just as a now-pregnant Pataki was beginning her third book, David suffered a devastating stroke. The result of medically negligible imperfections in David's anatomy and "a handful of unique situational circumstances," the event was unthinkable for someone who was just 30. It was "so improbable that there was not even medical literature available" for doctors to consult. Miraculously, the youthful plasticity of David's brain helped him recover within a year's time to lead a normal yet permanently altered life. Supportive friends and family helped Pataki endure the aftermath of her husband's illness, which she dealt with by writing "Dear Dave" letters--some of which she interweaves into the narrative--that chronicled their struggles. The strength of this end-of-innocence book lies in its demystification of the idea that strokes only occur in older people. At the same time, however, the story's emotional intimacy often verges on overdone sentimentality.A flawed but heartfelt account of dedication and devotion.COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Publisher's Weekly
Starred review from April 2, 2018
In this powerful and immersive memoir, Pataki relives the harrowing year that followed her husband’s stroke in June 2015. “Does my right eye look weird?” 30-year-old Dave Levy asked his pregnant wife, novelist Pataki (The Accidental Empress), during a flight to Hawaii. Levy soon fell into a coma; he awakened the next day outwardly unchanged, but a part of his brain that coordinated mental activity had been severely damaged. Suffering from amnesia, he seemed like a different person to Pataki. “It was scary to see my brilliant husband’s body and mind kidnapped by this new, helpless, disoriented foreigner.” She began writing him daily letters to her husband “so that if Dave ever came back to me, he could read them.” With a faith embodied in the proverb “Through hottest fire is forged the strongest steel,” Pataki cared for her husband while raising their newborn daughter and often wondered, “How is it possible for my heart to hold such overwhelming feelings of joy and grief at the same time?” Interspersing details of Levy’s ongoing progress toward recovery, Pataki delivers an insightful look at how two people faced a life-altering test as a team “fighting to make the dreams of our future possible.”
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Formats
- Kindle Book
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
subjects
Languages
- English
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