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Title details for Beauty in the Broken Places by Allison Pataki - Available

Beauty in the Broken Places

A Memoir of Love, Faith, and Resilience

by Allison Pataki
Lee Woodruff
Audiobook
1 of 3 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 3 copies available
A deeply moving memoir about a couple whose lives were changed in the blink of an eye, and the love that helped them rewrite their future.
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, though seemingly strong and outwardly intact, he could not carry memories from hour to hour, much less from one day to the next. Allison 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, sifting through endless hospital bills and insurance paperwork, and 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 for 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 husband's turbulent road to recovery, the shifting nature of marriage, and the struggle of loving through pain and finding joy in the broken places.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 1, 2018

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780525630760
      • File size: 195621 KB
      • Duration: 06:47:32

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • 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.”

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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