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Book Reviews
Title: Crooked Smile: One Family's Journey Toward Healing, by Lainie Cohen, 2003
Publisher: Toronto, ECW Press, 2003
ISBN: 1-55022-573-1
Price: paper $19.95 CA
Description: 337 pp.
When I was asked to review Crooked Smile: One Family's Journey Toward Healing by Lainie Cohen, I was reminded by the Editor-in-Chief that a review need not be a critique. After reading this easy-to-read, yet gripping personal story of a family's life-transforming experience with traumatic brain injury, the Editor's words seem to have been unnecessary. For how can anyone possibly "critique" another's life and experiences?
Lainie Cohen's story is of her son's recovery from a brain injury sustained as the result of a motor vehicle rollover, and concurrently her own and her family's journey of discovery and healing. This book joins a growing list of books describing the consequences and, invariably unique, pattern of hope, adjustment, joy, anger, elation, sadness, struggle, triumph and determination.
While the author's stated purpose for writing the book is to "try to recapture events to help (her son) understand that period of time for which he has no memory", it has significance well beyond this single objective.
In its 39 brief chapters and epilogue spread over 337 pages, the families of other individuals affected by brain injury will find much in common with their own experiences-- both exhilarating and desperate. So, too, will professionals who do not have an inflated assessment of their own self-worth and expertise in the yet imperfect field of applied neuroscience and rehabilitation.
In a candid reading of this book, professionals will hopefully acknowledge, as Lainie Cohen's story of her son's recovery makes clear, that we do not yet know with any certainty the trajectory that any person's recovery will take, even though some will undoubtedly continue to offer predictions that serve to confuse and distress rather than encourage and support. Yet precise predictions about expected outcomes are typically what families new to this human tragedy of brain injury so desperately seek in the early days and months following injury.
But as Cohen's own discoveries reveal to the reader as the story of recovery gradually unfolds over the first one and a half years following injury, the path must be paved with the bricks of self-discovered hope and determination-- two elements that medicine and neuroscience cannot quantify or administer, or that they may even find as uncomfortable allies. Cohen also reveals that the path of recovery for the families and loved ones of someone who has sustained a brain injury must become one that focuses on looking forward to and pursuing a new "reality," rather than struggling with an evaporating effort to recapture the past.
Perhaps Cohen's most important revelation is the power that family, friends and cultural and religious ritual provide to the process of "re-creation." For someone like me who may take weeks or even months to finish a book, to be able to say that this book was read cover-to-cover in less than 24 hours is a testament to its interest, relevance and sheer humanity. Anyone who has been touched by brain injury, or who works in a professional capacity with those who have, would do well to read this story. Perhaps other readers, like this reviewer, will wish that one day they too may have the opportunity to meet this family if for no other reason than to fill in the gaps between where the main part of the story leaves off at 18-months post-injury and the epilogue that tantalizes the reader with images from years later of smiling family faces and brief anecdotes of successes and accomplishments.
If the experience of others serves as a valid reference point, it is likely that this interim period was as filled with agonies and elations as were the first 16 to 18 months. We can hope that Lainie Cohen will enrich us with a second book that will take us further along the journey and help describe what, like the 90% of the iceberg resting below the surface, comes to be the life lived by someone who has sustained a brain injury and the loved ones around him. This part of the story of brain injury survivorship and recovery needs to be told.
Review by
Gerrit Groeneweg, Ph.D., C.Psych.
Executive Director, Brain Injury Rehabilitation Centre, Calgary, Alberta
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Calgary
Email: gerrit.groeneweg@brainrehab.ca
To read Judy Stawnchyko's's review of Crooked Smile, go to Stawnychko's Review
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