a review from humboldt

One of my professors at Humboldt, Professor Janet Winston, wrote this review about my book! I am including it here in its entirety:

“We are other, no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday.” This epigraph, from Samuel Beckett’s Proust (1931), opens Salman Rushdie’s memoir about surviving a near-death stabbing in 2022 (Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder, Random House, 2024). In “Rehab” (chapter 4), Rushdie’s narrator ponders whether “[language] could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, make it mine.” 

Language–in the form of non-fiction prose and haiku–is the tool Emily Silver Owen seizes on to take charge of her life upon regaining consciousness after surviving the impact of a drunk driver’s car in college. Her new memoir–The Best of the Worst: My True Story of Surviving and Thriving after a Traumatic Brain Injury (Rainmaker Publishing, 2024) — provides a lively, gripping, frequently humorous account of what it is like to come back from her own near death to a new reality, a transformed personhood, what her narrator refers to as “Emily 2.0.” 

Emily 2.0, we are told, “has no filter.” In contrast to the “unreliable narrator” trope but similarly useful as a literary device, the “unfiltered narrator” that Owen creates offers her readers a keen sense of verisimilitude. We become privy to Emily 2.0’s many frustrations—everything from not remembering the first time Emily 1.0 had sex to her initial thoughts about wanting the driver who hit her “to suffer.”

Although Owen lost five years of memories and can’t dream, she deftly fills in the gaps of her personal story through a painstaking process of dictation, which she starts shortly after getting home, then writing with her non-dominant but now less impaired hand, and through conversing with friends and her longtime therapist. 

In “healing our bodies, but not healing our planet” (chapter 4), she recounts the gross wastefulness of the healthcare industrial complex through the lens of her Environmental Studies degree, the successful effort she made to implement recycling at her final rehabilitation center, and her vision for applying a “zero waste” paradigm at hospitals nationwide.

The gut-wrenching chapter 7, titled “teddy, who would have died for me, and did,” describes the intimacy of their human-animal bond. “Teddy was a weird combination of my little brother and my son. . .  Sometimes, I was mom to him. Other times, I was the cool older sister.”

With haiku that begin and end every chapter, epistolary segments, and a narrative voice that is at once probing, funny, poignant, and whip smart, Owen’s memoir entertains as well as educates, asking the reader to cultivate an “awareness of neurodivergent brain processing” as something complex and deeply human. 

“I was injured but

I am a dandelion,

Growing through the cracks”

Owen’s reader grows right along with her. 

~Professor Janet Winston, Department of English, California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt