Medical

No Such Thing: Read the Reviews

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

“I bought the Kindle version to read on a trip, thinking there might be a moment here and there when I could relax with a book. Well. I was immediately absorbed and compelled to read it every chance I had. I am so glad you were able to get it out there. It’s not only a very good read, but a very important investigation of a faulty system, which you so skillfully exposed. It is a poignant personal story that will resonate with many, I’m sure, but also a journalistic tour de force.”

front cover of book with words in white against a blue background "No Such Thing: A True Story of "Mild" Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery"

“Lynne Malcolm’s [sic] life changes when a chair she has been asked to sit in during a parent-teacher interview collapses and her head crashes into something hard. The resulting traumatic brain injury changes her life. What I loved about this book is how the writer combined the very personal story about her injury, how it affected her work, her relationship and her daily life with research about traumatic brain injuries. These types of injuries are not uncommon and they are serious. This book informs and supports people who have experienced traumatic brain injuries and helps explain to those of us lucky enough not to have had this kind of injury what others are going through. An excellent read.”

“I literally couldn’t put this book down. I read it in one day (with breaks). It combines compelling storytelling, great research into current physical and psychological knowledge, and deep understanding of the human side of illness and pain. The denial and minimization of a head injury, from the moment it happened, shows how poorly our society deals with accidents, illness and pain. I found the actions and behaviour of many of the people the author encountered shocking. Her honesty and vulnerability in telling us how this affected even the core of her life is refreshing. It stands in stark contrast to the dishonesty and lack of empathy among educators, doctors, and lawyers. I’m sure this book will help thousands of readers.”

“This is very compelling read detailing the arduous personal journey of recovery from concussion, a poignant story that will resonate with many who have experienced the frustration of an ailment that is not properly recognized. It is also an important investigation into the failures in our justice system which put immense barriers in the way of successfully obtaining compensation from parties whose actions have resulted in personal injury.”

“This excellent read shared a deeply personal experience with thoughtful and comprehensive research. Anyone who has a traumatic brain injury or knows someone with a traumatic brain injury would benefit from this book.”

“I finished this book in three reads. Although the content wasn’t an easy read, the writing certainly was. I enjoyed the style, going back and forth between personal memories and research. In some books, this can make it difficult to follow, but not so with your book! Congrats!”

“Lynne Melcombe’s telling of her concussion journey is generous, heartbreaking and ultimately inspiring. At a parent/teacher interview her chair falls apart and so does her life. No Such Thing shows with devastating detail how a single concussion can do enormous damage to any one of us, be it from a simple fall, a common car accident or (as in my case) a few seconds of street violence on a sunny afternoon. Concussions are often called invisible injuries. Lynne’s brave struggle to overcome hers is a revealing insider’s view.”

“This is an important book that deserves a wide audience. Beautifully written with raw honesty, No Such Thing is a blessing for concussion sufferers and a vital call for empathy and understanding from friends, family and anyone working in health care, insurance, education or policymaking.”

“One day in the middle of an ordinary life, [Lynne Melcombe] went to what should have been an unremarkable meeting and made a random choice. No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery is her harrowing account of what followed that random choice—from the gaslighting, indifference, and ignorance of healthcare professionals to the gotcha tactics of shareholder-driven insurance company lawyers. No Such Thing is a painfully personal but powerful memoir of Melcombe’s struggle to heal from a so-called “mild” brain injury, but it is also a well-researched indictment of medical, legal and political failure. It’s a must-read for anyone who might one day make a random choice in the middle of an unremarkable meeting. Which is to say all of us.”

Purchase your book or add your review to my comment section, my GoodReads page, or one (or more) of my book sale pages, below.

Paperback: Indigo.ca Amazon.ca Amazon.com Barnes & Noble
Ebook: Rakuten Kobo ebooks.com Kindle.ca Kindle.com iTunes nook

Book Launch for No Such Thing: My Journey Through Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

Please join me as I launch my first book, No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery (Iguana Books, 2026).

Saturday October 17, 6:30 PM, Sadhana Yoga and Sound, #3 (upstairs) 2559 Shaughnessy Street, Port Coquitlam, BC

A few excerpts:

Book cover titled 'no such thing' by Lynne Melcombe, featuring a blue background and white text. The subtitle reads 'A True Story of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery'.

From Chapter 1

I’ve often idly wondered why people make some of the smallest decisions: Does it matter which cookie I pick up from the plate or which stall I choose in a public bathroom? Will my choice change the course of my life?

On November 27, 2003, at 3:30 p.m., I make one of those random choices. I work at my desk until about 2:00 p.m. At around 2:45, I run a brush through my hair and swish a dollop of toothpaste around my mouth. By 3:00, I’m picking up my younger daughter from her elementary school. At 3:15, we’re rushing into her big sister’s high school, unaware that by 4:30 I’ll be signing in at the emergency department of the local hospital.

From Chapter 3: 1 Week Out

The Hotel Vancouver is a historic landmark, the last luxury hotel on the original Canadian Pacific Railway line. The tile floors are polished to a high sheen, the staff are as crisp and efficient as their uniforms, and the dimly lit piano bar serves great martinis. But on December 3, a week to the day after my fall, I’m not up to a drink or music. I’m there to meet with the employer in charge of the three contracts I’ve had to cancel, who is in Vancouver on other business. At the time, his company is my largest source of income, and I still believe I’ll be better in a few days, so it seems wise to accept his invitation. I take a cab from Port Moody to downtown Vancouver.

We sit in a quiet conversation area off to one side of the lobby. I’ve rested for the whole day, hoping my headache will remain at bay and I’ll be able to listen intelligently. My pain eases as I relax into casual conversation, and by the end of the meeting it’s receded enough that when he asks me to accompany him to a second and possibly a third meeting that evening, I agree.

We take a cab from the hotel to a house in Vancouver’s posh Point Grey area, where the client welcomes us into her home. Her furnishings have a sleek Scandinavian look, several cuts above IKEA. The décor is all neutral tones: off white and light tan with dark brown and black accents. The view out the massive back window on the main floor is enviable: twinkling city lights outline English Bay and the Burrard Street Bridge as it traverses False Creek from Kitsilano to the West End. Up on Grouse Mountain the floodlights illuminating the main ski run hang in the night sky above the city like a constellation.

The client is warm, and the conversation appears lively—but I can’t follow it. I know they’re speaking English the same way I can identify several languages by their sound and a few words, but I have no idea what they’re saying. The pressure in my head started up again in the cab, and as I try to focus my attention the vise-like feeling intensifies. As minutes tick painfully by, I realize I can no longer pick out even occasional words. When my boss and I step out the door and he asks if I’m ready for the next meeting, I feel incredulous. My pain is so bad I think it must be visible—blood should be trickling out of my eyes and ears or seeping through my pores. Politely declining his invitation, I spend an agonizing hour in a cab back to Port Moody.

From Chapter 3: 3 Weeks Out

I used to love Christmas shopping. I enjoyed taking my time and finding just the right gift for everyone. As the kids have grown older, it’s become harder to find things within our budget for them. At some point, my husband pointed out that if we left shopping until just before Christmas, those big-ticket items would be on sale; things we couldn’t afford in November become manageable by mid-December.

On December 20, we go shopping. We have a list. We know what we want for each person, and I know where we’re most likely to find it. We go into a store, find the item, and then my husband stands in line to pay while I make my way slowly out of the store and look for a place to sit down. When he emerges, he helps me up and I hold his arm for balance as we walk slowly to the next store.

The first day out, I manage a couple of hours of shopping. The second day, it’s ninety minutes. The third day, an hour. By December 24, with time running out, he says he’ll have to finish shopping without me.

“I’m sorry, Lynne. I know you love Christmas shopping.”

“It’s okay.”

“If it weren’t Christmas Eve—”

“I know. We’re out of time.”

I stay home with our seven-year-old and make the best of it. I don’t turn on my computer all day. We wrap gifts, fussing over the best paper for each person, picking the right colour of tissue paper to stuff gift bags, tying everything up with beautiful ribbons and handmade bows. Then we settle in on the twin recliners in the family room to watch a movie. For the first time since the accident, I feel good all day.

I feel good on Christmas Day too. I enjoy opening gifts with the family, cleaning up the mess afterward, and making our traditional Christmas breakfast of pancakes with maple syrup, sausages, and bacon. Mid-afternoon, my sister arrives with her three children, three foster children, and three-year-old grandson. After another round of gift-giving, it’s time to get ready for dinner at the home of another friend. For years, we’ve had large, loud holiday dinners, including fifteen to twenty people from three families and sometimes an extra friend or two. We take turns hosting, with the host family buying and cooking a twenty-five-pound turkey and the others supplying everything else.

This year, dinner is at the home of friends, and it’s my sister’s turn to bring potatoes and vegetables. She arrives at our house with all the vegetables and potatoes in bags, looking for help with the cutting and chopping. Even with all the adults pitching in, it takes two hours. We haven’t been working for long when I begin to feel the familiar tingling at my temples, the pressure starting at the crown of my head and spreading downward, a hat band tightening like a vise, the burning in my neck and right arm. I don’t say anything. I make it through dinner at our friends’ home, but by the time the desserts come out I have to retreat to the couch with a heating pad to my head.

This scene will repeat itself at every family dinner for years. A decade later, I will give up on them. We will start having smaller dinners at home with just immediate family. Two decades later, after the divorce, my children will be the ones hosting family dinners. I will attend, but I will always leave early. 

An activity that was perfectly normal before the injury, events I fully enjoyed, will never be normal again.

From Chapter 9: 18 Months Out

Around that time, my family life begins falling apart. It starts with one of my younger daughter’s school field trips. One of many reasons I’ve chosen self-employment is the flexibility it gives me to be involved in my children’s lives. When my older kids were in elementary school and now with my youngest, I often volunteer as a parent chaperone or driver on field trips.

In June 2005 I want to accompany my youngest daughter on her year-end class trip to the water slides near Hope, BC, but I can’t imagine myself coping with the noise and driving involved in accompanying a busload of excited nine-year-olds on a full-day outing, much less enduring the neck-snapping jostling of the slides. My son and a friend of his offer to drive the three of us there in the family car. They play in the water slides with my little girl; I’m just there. It’s not great, but it’s the best I can do. The day goes well enough, but I arrive home with a headache that persists for four days. I can do little but lie in a dark, quiet room and wait for it to pass, wondering how I’ll explain missed deadlines to clients this time.

More school field trips will be out of the question. I feel like I’m letting my daughter down. My husband, who works in an inner-city elementary school, tells me to stop beating myself up. “She’s well taken care of. Plenty of parents work full time and don’t have the opportunity to go on field trips with their kids. This is not going to damage her for life.”

“We used to be so close. We’re not anymore, and I don’t know how to fix that without taking time off work.”

“How can we afford that?” he asks. I have no answer. Conversation over. 

In the years that follow, I feel the distance between her and me growing. She no longer confides in me; she goes to her father or her siblings. I miss her. After the lawsuit ends, I try to do fun activities with her, to intervene on her behalf when things in her life go awry, and sometimes to reassert myself as a person of authority in her life. Most of my efforts only seem to increase the distance between us.

Many years later, she shares with me how much pain my sudden disappearance from an active role in her life caused her. Given how hard it is for adults to understand brain trauma, it’s no surprise that, as a seven-year-old, she doesn’t understand what’s happening. All she knows is that I used to wake her in the morning by holding her in my arms and singing “You are my sunshine,” and then one day I stopped. It’s like I vanished. I’m there physically but I’m not “there” at all.

From Chapter 13: 3.5 Years Out

The mediation takes place in an office building in downtown Vancouver. I wear navy-blue dress pants and a waist-length navy-blue cardigan—or is it grey pants and a knee-length grey cardigan? Regardless, they are consignment-store finds, as usual, with the sweater (either one of them) just a tad too large in the shoulders. We sit at a conference table that could accommodate up to a dozen people. There is a smaller, separate room where my husband waits and reads his book and to which Anu and I retreat for breaks. LB, her law student, and the in-house counsel for the insurance company, who has taken the ferry over from Victoria for the day, take their breaks in our main meeting room.

I don’t remember the name of the insurance company’s in-house lawyer, only that Anu has told me she has a reputation for playing hardball, which she relies on for credibility in her professional world. She is slim, has short hair, and wears a hearing aid. LB sits in the middle on the opposite side of the table, her student on her left and the in-house lawyer on her right. Anu sits to my right and the mediator, a tall, solid man in his fifties dressed in a sport jacket and casual shirt, sits at the head of the table with a wall-to-wall window behind him. 

It’s a drizzly March morning. The mediator introduces himself and outlines why we’re here. Anu presents the facts of our case. LB gives the defense’s response. I don’t remember much more than that. 

Around noon, we break for lunch. A sumptuous buffet has been catered in—bread rolls and croissants, deli meats and cheeses, crudités with dips, chunks of fresh tropical fruits. It’s far more than eight people (including my husband) can eat. I wonder who is paying for it and what will happen with the leftovers.

After lunch, on my way back from the ladies’ room, I walk past the open door to the conference room. A burst of laughter draws my attention, and I glance in. The three lawyers are sitting in their chairs, chatting and laughing. Catching my glance, LB speaks to me warmly.

“Did you want to join us?” she asks. “We’re just comparing the gargoyles on the building across the street to men we know.”

“No. Thanks.” She wants me to let my guard down. Crikey. Can’t she even take a lunch break? 

From Afterthoughts: 23 Years Out 

My neurologist, Dr. GR, was one of the people who believed me from the start when I told him about my pain. He keeps a file on his computer of different people in different places across the centuries who have reported similar symptoms after a hard hit to the head. Detractors write off such reports as coincidence—or worse, that the mTBI sufferers those reports track were malingering. One of the claims I’ve heard most often is that it simply doesn’t make sense that suddenly, after millennia of evolution, humans are suffering from an epidemic of injuries we’ve never suffered from before.

But it doesn’t take much thinking to realize that the world we inhabit today is entirely different than it was even a century ago. A century ago, most lifestyles still entailed a good deal of physical labour, so most humans had strong backs and necks to provide some protection against such injuries. Even when people were injured, the jobs they returned to were less likely than they are now to involve sitting at a desk, doing close visual work, and reading off a computer screen, all of which are known to cause their own injuries to the neck and the vision system as well as to exacerbate injuries acquired in other ways.

Most jobs today, from retail sales to farming, demand a level of social and intellectual skills they didn’t require a century ago, not to mention technological capacity most of us could not imagine as recently as my first job in retail at the age of sixteen. In this era, whether mild traumatic brain injuries are happening more frequently or are just reported more often and taken more seriously is not the point; the point is that if I had lived a century earlier and my day consisted of cleaning and baking, I probably would have felt better more quickly precisely because I would have had a stronger body and been putting fewer demands on my brain than in almost any job I could do in this century. And because of all this technology, almost everything we do demands more knowledge and training than ever before and has more consequences if not done to higher standards of quality, timeliness, and cost than ever before.

Against this backdrop, the evolutionary argument doesn’t hold up. Just as the planet didn’t evolve to tolerate the level of carbon our society pumps out in a day, month, or year, humans didn’t evolve for the way most of us, at least in Western culture, now live our lives. Sitting at a desk all day, walking while hunched over cell phones, or sitting in gridlocked traffic for a couple of hours every day is not good for our bodies. So, when are we going to recognize it’s not only our bodies that have not had time to adapt to the stressful, sedentary lives many of us live? Our brains, too, are being taxed in ways that evolution has not had enough time to catch up to.

To buy a copy, visit: Amazon.ca Barnes & Noble Indigo

To purchase the ebook, visit: Kobo Kindle (.ca) Kindle (.com) iTunes nook ebooks.com

To leave a review, visit the above sites or Goodreads.

Mild Traumatic Brain Injury: My Book, My Story

/ Lynne Melcombe / 3 Comments

Published August 2026 by Iguana Books.

To buy a copy, visit: Amazon.ca Amazon.com Barnes & Noble

To purchase the ebook, visit: Kobo Kindle (.ca) Kindle (.com) iTunes nook

image of book cover
To read excerpts, click on the image.

“I’ve often idly wondered why people make some of the smallest decisions: Does it matter which cookie I pick up from the plate or which stall I choose in a public bathroom? Will my choice change the course of my life?

“On November 27, 2003, at 3:30 p.m., I make one of those random choices. I work at my desk until about 2:00 p.m. At around 2:45, I run a brush through my hair and swish a dollop of toothpaste around my mouth. By 3:00, I’m picking up my younger daughter from her elementary school. At 3:15, we’re rushing into her big sister’s high school, unaware that by 4:30 I’ll be signing in at the emergency department of the local hospital….

“The door opens at precisely 3:30. The teacher says goodbye to the previous parents and hello to me. I follow her across the room, where she seats herself on one side of a table and motions to two chairs on the other side.

“I choose the nearest, and that choice changes my life.”

All too often, this is exactly the way a brain injury starts—not specifically with a parent-teacher meeting or a chair, but with a random action at a random time. Contrary to common belief, most concussions—the lay term for mild traumatic brain injury—do not happen to professional athletes or occur in motor vehicle accidents. Most mTBIs happen to random people doing random things at random moments in their lives. 

I can’t review my own book, but I can give you a sample of what you’ll learn if you read it:

  • In Canada, 400,000 people aged twelve and older sustained at least one mTBI in 2019.
  • While 70–85% of mTBI sufferers recover within days or weeks, at least 15% and as many as 50% have symptoms for months or years.
  • It is not necessary to lose consciousness or have amnesia to have had an mTBI. In fact, only about 10% of mTBIs include loss of consciousness. 
  • It is not necessary to have taken a hit to the head to have had a concussion. The problem is not what happens externally, but what happens when the brain is bounced around inside the skull, and that can easily happen during any rapid acceleration-deceleration (whiplash-type) event. 
  • Despite facts like these, people who suffer so-called mild traumatic brain injury are often treated dismissively, even by their own physicians. 

Facts like these—and many more—gave rise to my book’s title. As concussion experts who are far more learned than I have noted, there’s no such thing as a “mild” traumatic brain injury. I support this contention with research on mTBI that I updated roughly annually and on the challenges of taking such an injury through a personal injury lawsuit, which are even greater now than they were when I was doing so.  

No Such Thing is a must-read for anyone who might one day make a random choice in the middle of an unremarkable meeting. Which is to say all of us.

Stephen Kimber

I believe my book is well written and compelling, but rather than taking my word for it, read these words from Stephen Kimber, the award-winning journalist and author who co-founded and formerly directed the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction Writing at University of King’s College in Halifax, from which I graduated in 2015: 

“One day in the middle of an ordinary life, Lynne Melcombe went to what should have been an unremarkable meeting and made a random choice. No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery is her account of what followed that random choice—from the gaslighting, indifference, and ignorance of healthcare professionals to the gotcha tactics of shareholder-driven insurance company lawyers. No Such Thing is a painfully personal but powerful memoir of Melcombe’s struggle to heal from a so-called “mild” brain injury, but it is also a well-researched indictment of medical, legal, and political failure. It’s a must-read for anyone who might one day make a random choice in the middle of an unremarkable meeting. Which is to say all of us.”

Published August 2026 by Iguana Books.

To buy a copy, visit: Amazon.ca Amazon.com Barnes & Noble

To purchase the ebook, visit: Kobo Kindle (.ca) Kindle (.com) iTunes nook ebooks.com

For more on health, illness, and injury:

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Leslie Buxton

Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening, by Reneé Pellerin

Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, ed. by E.D. Morin and Jane Cawthorne

Grief and Mental Health: Finding Strength in Loss

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment
Close-up of a tattoo depicting a girl's profile surrounded by flowers, with the title 'One Strong Girl: Surviving the unimaginable, A mother's memoir' by S. Lesley Buxton.

Grief is not defined in the DSM V as a mental health issue, but I’m including it in my thematic series on mental health for two reasons: First, during several episodes of profound grief in my life, I was never quite in my right mind; and second, surviving grief calls on deep mental health reserves, without which one is at risk of diving into the bottomless pit of mental illness. 

Lesley Buxton has been visited by more grief than most—enough to know that to survive and continue finding joy in life, she must have deep reserves of mental wellness. Buxton’s book, One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, tells the story of watching her only child die, over the course of years, of a rare neurological illness. Yet even amid her grief, she finds joy. 

One Strong Girl is a deeply personal and moving memoir of living with loss. It’s no wonder this heartbreaking yet inspiring book won the inaugural Pottersfield Prize for Creative Nonfiction. 

Book cover for 'A Cure for Heartache' by Mary Jane Grant featuring an open window with a view of a cityscape, a notebook and pencil, a cup of tea, and cookies on a table.

Mary Jane Grant is another person who has survived more episodes of grief than most. But when her husband suddenly left her after decades of marriage, something inside her demanded more attention. So, she went off to Europe and, in a tea shop one day, when taking in the fragrances of various blends, she started on the path that led to her book, A Cure for Heartache. 

This slim volume recounts how she worked through her grief by teaching herself to experience “life’s simple pleasures, one moment at a time.” After my marriage ended, given that I was the one who ended it, I was surprised at the depths of my grief. A big part of my path out of it was learning the practice of mindfulness through, among other things, a course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, which teaches a secular approach to meditation whose effectiveness in mental and physical health is supported by decades of properly executive research. 

While Grant doesn’t write about attending any mindfulness programs or even use the word “mindfulness,” that is indeed what she describes. It is amazing to me that she learned to do this almost instinctively. That is mental health, and during Mental HEALTH Awareness Month, we need to be as mindful of using mental health to prevent mental illness as we are of specific mental illnesses like those discussed in last week’s post. 

Book cover of 'Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition' by Laura Pratt, featuring a wilted rose with smoke rising from it, and a red 'Canadian' label.

Laura Pratt’s Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition is another study in surviving the loss of a partner. After a passionate, six-year affair ends suddenly and without explanation, the author crawls through the rocky emotional terrain of her grief. What differentiates Heartbroken from many other books about grieving is the way the author has, in lyric prose, braided together the story of the love affair and her profound grief after it ends with psychological research and artistic depictions of love and loss. 

This is one of the most poetic grief memoirs I’ve ever read. It amazes me that Pratt didn’t win a bucket or two of awards for it. 

Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care, by Susan MacLeod, is less about the grief of losing a mother than of trudging day by day through the process of watching a mother die, slowly, while trying to find a safe and loving place for her to spend her final days. I remember this part of my mother’s life so well—her decline, searching for a nursing home, pushing emotions away until a more appropriate time. 

Book cover for 'Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care' by Susan MacLeod, featuring illustrations and quotes from notable figures.

After she died, it was as if each of those losses caught up with us one at a time; every time we thought we were finally adjusting to the permanence of her absence, another tidal wave of grief would wash over us. It was as if we were finally grieving each smaller loss in sequence over the year or two after her death. This is what I found myself reflecting on as I read MacLeod’s moving memoir, depicted in drawings that blended whimsical thoughts and self-deprecation with the pain of loss.

Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is, by Maryanna Gabriel, is another story of losing a mother, about as different from the previous one as it could possibly be. The back cover reads: “For Maryanna Gabriel, the unexpected death of her artistic mother would change everything in her life. More than just overcoming this loss, she felt that she needed answer, not from other, but from within herself …. At times meditative yet punctuated with humour, the story takes place in a compelling European tableau where legends of saints and miracles abide.”

Book covers for 'One Strong Girl,' A Cure for Heartache,' 'Heartbroken,' 'Dying for Attention,' and 'Walking the Camino.'

Walking the Camino is not the first book I’ve read about this pilgrimage taken by thousands of people from across the globe every year. More than a decade ago, I edited a manuscript about an author’s years of long-distance hiking with his wife, part of which was completing the Camino walk in three stages over three consecutive years. I was compelled to want to do the same; I still haven’t done that, but Gabriel’s book is a welcome reminder that there are many ways to integrate life’s losses and move forward.

I’d also recommend: 

Still, I Cannot Save You: A Memoir of Sisterhood, Love, and Letting Go by Kelly S. Thompson. 

Many of us have sibling relationships that waver between love and tolerance (or worse) over the years. Most of us don’t have to face the tragic loss of a sibling far too young. Thompson’s memoir is a moving study in mental illness (her sister’s addiction) and mental wellness (integrating the loss of the same sister to cancer into her life). 

Graphic Memoir Insights on Aging, Long-Term Care, and Dying

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

I remember all too well my mother’s dying process. My father predeceased her by almost 20 years. Five years after he died, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She went 15 years later, outlasting her doctor’s predictions by five years. 

Cover of 'Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care' by Susan MacLeod, featuring an illustration of a person in a wheelchair and various humorous sketches around the edges.

By the mid-1980s it had become apparent that she’d no longer be able to live on her own. It was her choice to move into long-term care; she didn’t want to be a burden and nothing my sister or I said could change her mind. And, it would have been difficult. I had two young children with chronic illnesses; my sister was working full-time and working on her bachelor’s degree. So, at our mother’s insistence, we began investigating nursing homes. 

We were going on tours of different facilities for four to six months before she found the one she’d move into. It was a newer facility in a lovely part of Vancouver, and the residents had private rooms. The staff were kind and competent and obviously cared about her. If she ever felt unhappy with the choice she’d made, she didn’t share it with us. 

As I read Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care (Conundrum Press, 2021) by Susan MacLeod (class of 2021) in a single sitting, I was reminded that not every older person receives the loving care our mother did. Not all families are attentive or involved, as we were, and not all facilities take particularly good care of their residents. 

A cartoon illustration depicting a frustrated individual with glasses, expressing anger and confusion about their situation. The text includes phrases like 'Sometimes, when I was alone, I felt like losing it!' and comments on nursing home care labelled as 'enhanced.' There are also smaller figures representing laundry care, highlighting a humorous frustration.
A cartoonish drawing depicting a person pushing a wheelbarrow near a cliff with swirling patterns in the air, accompanied by the text '...the personal and systemic whirlpools of weirdness were just beginning.'
Cartoon illustration discussing healthcare system issues, featuring a distressed hospital worker and an elderly patient. Text highlights problems with hospital bed availability and the term 'bed blockers' for elderly patients who cannot return home.

Perhaps because it’s written as a graphic memoir, MacLeod is able to draw an unapologetically stark picture of the problems not only with long-term care but with the ageism that seems endemic to our culture. (Chapter 1 is called “I’ve Always Disliked Old People” and Chapter 2 is “I’ve Always Disliked Death.) She’s also unflinchingly honest about the flaws in her family of origin, including her own merciless bullying of her younger brother when they were children and her realization that just because she’s ready to be forgiven doesn’t mean he’s ready to forgive her.

Yet Mac Leod periodically lightens the tone of what could be an unrelentingly depressing topic with self-deprecating humour. For example, about once per chapter, we see a motif of a banner framing a cartoon tile that says, “Susan Seeks an Expert” or “Solution Susan Strikes.” My personal favourite: SYSTEMS THAT MAKE HUMANS INHUMANE. This comes up several times in the book and reminds me very much of the problems my sister and I have had with the care home our older brother is now living in. 

With such a visual medium, it’s impossible to insert an excerpt of text and make it make sense, so instead I’ve included some of MacLeod’s full-page drawings to give a sense of her story and her skills as an artist/author. 

Dying for Attention is such an easy read yet at the same time such honest and compelling reading that I think it should be available to anyone who’s considering a nursing home for an older loved one. At the very least, it should be required reading in programs for care aides. 

Reviews of other books on family and loss:

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable — A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Lesley Buxton

Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, by Pauline Dakin

Walking the Camino: On Earth As It Is, by Maryanna Gabriel

Still, I Cannot Save You: A Memoir of Sisterhood, Love, and Letting Go, by Kelly S. Thompson

Essential Feminist Reads for International Women’s Month

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

March 8 was International Women’s Day, and the month of March is International Women’s Month. With a nod to both, with this post I acknowledge several books from the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction program that further the cause of justice and equality for women. 

Cover of the book 'Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America' by Sheima Benembarek, featuring ripe figs and a 'Staff Pick' label.

It’s hard to pick just a few books. The program is dominated by women, all of whom I’d describe as feminist, and many of their stories are about women’s lives, whether their own or others. But if I’m going to stick strictly to books with a decidedly feminist theme, I’d choose these five:

Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America by Sheima Benembarek. This book was eye-opening for me. It honestly never occurred to me that a blue-haired, niqab-wearing, orthodox Muslim woman might be polyamorous. It doesn’t surprise me that a child from a Muslim family might be just as likely as a child from any other family to be transgender. But I have to admit some surprise—the good kind—in reading about a same-sex couple, both comedians, one a Palestinian-born Muslim the other a Jew from Montreal who perform individually and as a pair who starred in a Crave comedy special called Marriage of Convenience. The title of the book, Halal Sex, comes from a term for sex practiced within a heterosexual Muslim marriage. But Benembarek put a decidedly feminist twist on it by redefining it as “all consensual sex between adults.” 

Book cover featuring the title 'Every Boy I Ever Kissed' by Nellwyn Lampert, with a graphic design showing a woman in a red dress and hands embracing her.

Every Boy I Ever Kissed: A Memoir by Nellwyn Lampert. I started calling myself a feminist at the age of 13. I was in way too much of a hurry to lose my virginity, which I did at 14. I had no idea of the connection between the two. But there is a connection, a pretty important one. And that connection is a major part of what Lampert wrestles with in this coming-of-age memoir. As the cover blurb says, “for Nellwyn Lampert, losing her virginity would turn out to be anything but simple. Her chosen partners struggled with porn-induced erectile dysfunction and other crises of masculinity. And in the bedroom, nothing went according to plan.” So, in that regard, our experiences were entirely different. But in terms of “the realities of sexual liberation, female empowerment, and masculinity,” the issues are not that different at all than the ones I was too young to realize I was doing with more than 50 years ago that sexual freedom and gender freedom are two very different concepts. 

Cover of the book 'Highway of Tears' by Jessica McDiarmid, featuring an illustrated mask and a striking orange background. The subtitle highlights themes of racism and justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid. It’s a grim fact that Indigenous women make up only about 4% of the female population in Canada but accounted for 16% of all female homicides between 1980 and 2012. And a disturbing number of those women are abducted, raped, and murdered along a strip of highway in northern BC called the Highway of Tears. From the back cover: “Journalist Jessica McDiarmid investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate where Indigenous women and girls are over-policed, yet under-protected.” As difficult as this book was to read, it was just as difficult to put down. I can’t imagine a better lens through which to examine the intersection of racism and misogyny than through the horrific impacts of colonization by patriarchal white, European culture on Indigenous women and girls. 

Book cover of 'F Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism' by Lauren McKeon featuring bold black text and a pink graffiti-style accent.

F Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism by Lauren McKeon. It’s always surprised me that when I say I’ve been calling myself a feminist since I was 13 but I haven’t always felt that feminism welcomed me, what many people seem to hear is that I don’t think feminism is necessary or relevant. In fact, I’m saying exactly the opposite—that feminism remains as relevant today as ever and that’s why it’s so important to ensure that ALL sorts of women feel a sense of belonging within the movement. That was my read on McKeon’s book. She recognizes that too many women have moved in the wrong direction instead of understanding that feminism is for every woman—that, indeed, until we are all free, none of us are free. Why has this happened? That, as McKeon points out, is a question for feminists to answer. And as women’s rights are being eroded daily, it’s becoming increasingly urgent that we answer it and ensure that all women feel that the arms of feminism welcome them. 

Book cover for 'Conspiracy of Hope' by Renée Pellerin, featuring stylized illustrations of a woman's chest with highlighted areas, and subtitle 'The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening'.

Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening by Renée Pellerin. No woman in the western world isn’t familiar with the unique joy (she said sarcastically) of having her breasts pulled and twisted and squished between cold metal plates for their regular mammogram. In this book, Pellerin, an award-winning producer with the CBC, does a deep dive into the evidence supporting and opposing regular mammography screening. And her conclusion is that the evidence weighs strongly in favour of less screening. It’s supported by vested interests, false positives can lead to invasive overtreatment, false negatives can give women a false sense of security, its effectiveness differs significantly for different age groups, and regular exposure to radiation can, in a small number of cases, increase risk of cancer. It’s an eye-opening book that every woman should read and consider carefully before assuming that doctor’s orders should never be questioned. 

Happy International Women’s Month and enjoy the reading!

No Such Thing: A Memoir of ‘Mild’ TBI and How You Can Help

/ Lynne Melcombe / Leave a comment

Almost every week for more than a year, I’ve been using this space to review and champion books by graduates of the prestigious Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Nonfiction at University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Book cover of 'No Such Thing' by Lynne Melcombe, featuring a blue background and white text.
To read excerpts, click on the image.

I’ve been mostly absent for a couple of months, first because I was on a much-needed vacation, and since then because I’ve been devoting my time to a book project of my own.

I undertook the MFA program so I could learn to write, not just any book, but this book.

This book recounts my experience of and research related to a “mild” TBI (concussion) that I had over 20 years ago and from which I’ve never fully recovered.

My experience taught me that there is “no such thing” as a “mild” traumatic brain injury. That’s why I’ve called my book No Such Thing: A True Story of “mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery.

Most people recover from concussions in a few days—weeks at most.

But up to 30% of people don’t. Some go on having symptoms for months, even years. 

I’ve never fully recovered from my injury. I felt a need to write a book about it for a few reasons.

  • Brain injury is very isolating. The injury itself—pain, brain fog, memory loss—can make it hard to communicate. 
  • Many people—doctors, lawyers, co-workers, friends, family—don’t believe you. That makes the pain and isolation worse. 
  • The stigma against people who pursue legal measures based on ongoing misperceptions about brain injury add stress and emotional trauma that complicate a person’s ability to recover.
  • There wasn’t much to support people going through this experience twenty years ago. Anyone going through it now deserves better.

At the time of my injury, I often felt like I was going crazy.

Doctors kept telling me I should be better. Lawyers put my life under a microscope. Family, friends, and coworkers acted—and sometimes said—I was just looking for attention and I needed to get over it.

But as years went by and social media exploded, I began hearing other people’s stories of not-so-mild traumatic brain injury. I began keeping abreast of current research that supported what they were going through.

Gradually, I stopped questioning my own perceptions.

When I wrote my book, I was writing the book I needed at the time. 

I wrote it for the people who need it now, for those who love them, and for those who want to better understand this underestimated injury.

I finished my book a couple of years ago and, full of hope, I started looking for a publisher.

Every one of them responded the same way: timely topic, great story, well written, but I lacked enough of an audience to justify their investment in publishing it.

One of the things I learned in the MFA program was the necessity of building an audience while writing my book.

But while I was writing, I was coping with a divorce, navigating health issues, and rebuilding a freelance writing and editing business.

I was also managing the symptoms of my injury every day.

I lacked the ability to do it all.

At first, when I realized that no “real” publishers wanted my book, I felt like I’d failed.  

But I also realized that if I gave up and left my book sitting in a virtual drawer, that would feel like failure too.

So, I turned to Iguana Books.

Iguana Books is a hybrid publisher.

A hybrid publisher retains the quality controls conventional publishers rely on but with a requirement that authors cover production costs, as they would in self-publishing. 

Iguana takes hybrid publishing a step further by asking their authors to crowdfund production costs. This ensures costs are covered and allows authors to test the market and build an audience for their book.

Iguana recommended Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform designed specifically for creators.

As I started building my Kickstarter campaign, an interesting thing happened.

I stopped feeling like I’d failed.

I realized that no matter how I publish my book, it will succeed based on same things as any other book—my research, my writing, and my promotional efforts.

That realization has renewed my confidence in my abilities, injected my efforts with energy, and restored my faith in the book I’ve written.

That’s where you come in.

I need your support to raise the $9,000 required to fund the production process—copy editing, layout, distribution. And I’m asking you to pledge whatever you can to help me get there. 

Please go to my Kickstarter campaign page and learn more about why I feel my book is timely, important, and necessary.

Then consider backing my project with a pledge in any amount you can manage.

What’s in it for you?

If you pledge $10 or more, you’ll receive a reward tailored to the size of your contribution—an e-book, a signed paperback with No Such Thing bookmarks, or a book club special for buying in bulk.

If you pledge less than $10—even only $1—I’ll give you a shout-out on social media and add your name to the acknowledgements in my book. 

If I don’t reach my $9,000 goal by March 15, my campaign will end and Kickstarter won’t collect any pledges. 

You have nothing to lose. 

What should you do next?

Well, you can click away to another page, if you want.

Or you can go to my campaign page, read more about my book, and consider making a pledge.

If you think my project is worth backing, click the button for a reminder when my campaign goes live on February 16. Then, if you still feel so inclined, pledge whatever you feel is right. 

If you change your mind before my campaign ends, you can change or withdraw your pledge. No questions, no obligations.

All I ask is that you think about it.

With gratitude,
Lynne

The Truth Behind Breast Cancer Screening: A Review

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

I’ve never met a woman who doesn’t hate having her biennial mammogram. And why would any woman not hate it? It feels like the technician is trying to pull your breast right out of your chest and squash it as flat as a pancake between two very cold metal slabs. 

Regardless, every two years, I receive a reminder letter that I’m due for my mammogram and I dutifully make my next appointment and get it done. It’s become such a regular part of women’s health care regimes once they’re past 40 that almost no one questions it. 

Enter Reneé Pellerin (class of 2016), who questions it deeply in Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth about Breast Cancer Screening (Goose Lane Editions, 2018). Pellerin points out that, at best, research doesn’t clearly support screening programs, and at worst, it suggests they may cause harm. 

In a cover blurb written by Dr. Brian Goldman, host of CBC’s White Coat, Black Art, the veteran ER physician writes, “Pellerin knows the science better than many of the doctors in whose hands women have placed their trust.” On that note, I’ll let Pellerin speak for herself. The following passages are taken from the beginning and the end of the introduction:

Based on the knowledge of the day and her own decade of experience, [Maureen] Roberts [the clinical director of the Edinburgh Breast Screening Project] expressed serious misgivings about the nationwide breast screening program launched in the United Kingdom the year before she died. She acknowledged … research that showed mammography screening reduced deaths from breast cancer by 30 percent. But she urged her readers to also consider other research that did not find benefit….

Then she asked, “If screening does little or no good could it possibly be doing any harm? We are all reluctant to face this…. There is also an air of evangelism, few people questioning what is actually being done,” she wrote. “Are we brainwashing ourselves into thinking that we are making a dramatic impact on a serious disease before we brainwash the public?” …

Toward the end of the introduction, Pellerin concludes:

The story of mammography screening is a story about science and medicine. It’s a story about hundreds of thousands of women who were participants in screening studies around the world. It’s a story about honest differences and sincere efforts to do good. It is also a story about vested interests, money, and greed….mammography is a multi-billion dollar industry that provides employment to radiologists, creates markets for the latest in imaging equipment built by multinational companies, and perpetuates the bureaucracy and infrastructure of government-run screening programs. Pink ribbon charities that benefit financially from our fear of breast cancer take advantage of paternalistic messaging around early detection. The desire to believe in early detection is intuitive and compelling with the result that women and their doctors become complicit in the conspiracy, if unwittingly.

It’s not unusual for scientists to disagree, and controversy in medicine is not surprising…. But nothing in medicine has ever generated as much controversy or conflict as mammography screening. The mammogram story is about much more than argument. Sadly, it is often about backstabbing, bullying, and deliberate suppression of information. These are the by-products of fear and hope.

If you’re a woman, or if you’ve ever loved a woman—partner, mother, daughter, sister—read this book. You may still go for your regular mammograms—I do—but with just a little more doubt in my mind than I ever used to have. And that’s not a bad thing. 

Other books for women: 

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Lesley Buxton.

Halal Sex: The Intimate Lives of Muslim Women in North America, by Sheima Benembarek.

Every Boy I Ever Kissed: A Memoir, by Nellwyn Lampert.

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, by Jessica McDiarmid.

F Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, by Lauren McKeon.

How Punk Music Saves Lives

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

I live with depression and anxiety. I do All The Things to reduce the extent to which they affect my daily life but, regardless, they are my companions. So, I know, on a personal level, what it is to look for a community where I feel accepted and understood as I am.

Cover of the book 'Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey Through Mental Health' by Jason Schreurs, featuring a microphone with a tangled cord and the book's title prominently displayed.

Jason Schreurs (class of 2022) wrote Scream Therapy: A Punk Journey Through Mental Health (Flex Your Head Press, 2023) to reach out to his community. Schreurs lives with bipolar disorder. Depression and anxiety are not fun, but the roller coaster ride of bipolar disorder? As my mother used to say, “Thank the lord for small mercies.”

Scream Therapy is what Schreurs promises to be: a message to people who, at some point in their lives stumbled into punk music, often by way of skateboarding, and found their community. Punk concerts are always screaming loud, the mosh pits are nothing I could ever trust, and sometimes the live performances are improv’d by musicians who assembled just that evening, for that evening only.

I’m the first to admit I don’t like hard core music. The heaviest metal bands I’ve ever enjoyed are the likes of Steppenwolf, Rush, and the Doors—easy listening compared with punk. But the thesis of Scream Therapy is not that everyone should like punk. The thesis is that an inordinate number of punk rockers feel strongly, as Schreurs does, that punk music saved their lives. Without the community they found in punk—a community that gave them a sense of belonging for the first time … well, ever—they would have ended their own lives. 

Consider this passage about a man named Brian, now a middle-aged husband and dad with a day job that wouldn’t suggest anything about him as a person, much less how deeply he relies on punk music and the punk community for his mental health:

For Brian, leaving his parents’ house for a more stable environment allowed him to focus on turning his pain into positivity. Brian poured all he had into screaming in bands and organizing shows. At age 16, he booked a West Coast tour for Ashes, his first serious band. At 17, he went to Europe with Battery, the straight edge hardcore band his name became synonymous with for the next eight years. Between tours, Brian moved to Boston when he was 18 and set up one of the most popular recording studios of the ‘90s and ‘00s….

But depression creeped back into his life after opening the studio. He buried his internal turmoil and poured everything into the music, surrounding himself with a support network of bands like Gainesville, Florida’s Hot Water Music—unwavering rays of positivity with members that would do anything for him. It was the most amazing time of his life, but he kept his struggles hidden, stifling his inner doubt and emotional pain. “I was one of the most sought-after record producers for bands all over the world, and I felt like a failure.” Brian digs deep for the right words to make sense of that time. “The thing about depression is it’s not fucking reasonable. It doesn’t make sense.” 

(Boy, do I understand that sentiment.)

Years later, Brian’s nervous system refused to hold back his depression any longer.… “I remember my wife saying to me, ‘You need to be doing music. You need to be writing.’ I had to force myself to think about my issues and acknowledge them and not let them grow and become corrosive.” One evening, Brian picked up a guitar in his basement. Less than 10 minutes later, he had the first song he’d written in 20 years. I picture his song as a battering ram, bashing the pain trapped inside. “I can’t express to you the weight that came off my shoulders.” Brian sighs and tells me singing and songwriting for his new melodic hardcore band Be Well is his daily therapy….

“I don’t know that I’ve ever felt such gratitude as I feel toward punk and hardcore,” he says. “It gave me a family and an avenue to find myself at multiple times in my life when I needed a community to hear me, and see me, and appreciate not only my strengths but my weaknesses.” Brian chokes up and pretends to clear his throat. I do the same. His words could be mine. 

Not every type of music, or any art form, is for everyone. (I look at Jackson Pollock’s paintings and think What?) But there is a body of research on the importance of community to mental health, some of which Schreurs cites in Scream Therapy. It doesn’t matter what bring people together around as long as the community they create provides its members with a feeling of belonging, a feeling they have people to turn to as much to celebrate their victories as to seek support and reassurance when life sucks. 

I don’t imagine I’ll ever care for punk music. But if Schreurs and his peers find in the punk community what they need to get through life, more power to them. And more power to Jason Schreurs for reaching out to whomever he can reach through his book as well as his podcast, also called Scream Therapy, and letting them know there are people out there that they, too, can turn to for support, laughter, joy, reassurance—or maybe just to have a really satisfying scream. 

October 10 is World Mental Health Day. Here are some other books by MFA grads relating to mental health and the role of community in maintaining it: 

About mental health and its impact on one family:

Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood, by Pauline Dakin.

About the importance of building community around almost anything:

The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest, by Helena Moncrieff.

Just Jen: Thriving Through Multiple Sclerosis, by Jen Powell.

The Heart of Homestay: Creating Meaningful Connections When Hosting International Students, by Jennifer Robin Wilson.

About the power of community, as well as the challenges it can present:

The Minister’s Wife: A Memoir of Faith, Doubt, Friendship, Loneliness, Forgiveness, and More, by Karen Stiller.

Understanding How Concussion Affects Women’s Lives

/ Lynne Melcombe / 2 Comments

This week’s post is not about a book—well it is, sort of; and it’s not about a UKing’s grad, although it is about someone who attended the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program. 

Julia Nunes, who has cowritten two books on mental health with Scott Simmie, was in the class of 2016. We hit it off while we were in New York for the publishing residency. My book (which will be released in the spring) is about a concussion I suffered over twenty years ago now. She, too, was writing about concussion, focusing on her son, who was at that time lying in bed with, if memory serves, his second hockey concussion—crushing headaches, severe photophobia, disorienting dizziness, ongoing vomiting, the whole nine yards. 

The first night we were in New York, I was out to dinner with Deirdre Macdonald (a peer in the class of 2015 who’s just released her MFA book project, Her Hat in the Ring: Toronto Milliner El Jamon and Her Circle). As we got up to leave, I slipped on a piece of tomato on the floor and fell backward, striking the back of my head on the corner of a table in almost exactly the same spot I had struck in 2003, when I sustained the concussion I was writing about. 

I went by ambulance to the hospital (with Deirdre, bless her) and yes, I had another concussion. It nearly ruined my time in New York—headaches, dizziness, thankfully not vomiting—so I only attended a few of the lectures (couldn’t focus for long) and none of the social events (way too loud). By the last day, I was feeling a bit better, so Julia and I explored The Highline and walked around Strand Books.

I finished my degree that year; Julia didn’t get to finish the year because a short while later she fell and had a severe concussion. It took her months to recover. I think she’d hoped to return the following year, but then she suffered another concussion, and another (having one concussion increases the risk of having another). 

So, she never finished her degree (or, as far as I know, the book about the inadequate way children’s sports teams were dealing with concussion in players). However,  I recently read an excellent book called Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, edited by ED Morin and Jane Cawthorne (University of Alberta Press, 2021). Toward the end of this wonderful and vindicating anthology of essays is an essay by Julia Nunes called “The Next Hit.”

This excerpt hit home for me:

I attended a speech recently by a woman who lived first with post-concussion syndrome (PCS) and then with breast cancer. She shared a PowerPoint graph called “Sympathy by Casserole.” The comparison was stark: friends and family delivered more than sixty meals as she underwent chemotherapy versus zero meals post-concussion. Yet breast cancer, she said, was a breeze compared to PCS. The pain was less intense and the brain fog of chemotherapy had nothing on the confused, muddy state of the concussed mind.

I had something like this happen to me not long after my concussion. A friend who no longer lives on the Pacific Coast came into town with her husband for three months. In all that time, she found forty-five minutes for me but visited a friend who was dealing with breast cancer numerous times. When I expressed my hurt, she responded with something like, “Lynne, she has cancer. You bumped your head.” 

No one really understands concussion until and unless they live through it; no one understands that while seventy to eighty-five percent of concussions heal within days, weeks, or months, the other fifteen to thirty percent can continue causing symptoms for years, even lifetimes. 

Sadly, I know Julia understands—sadly because as much I’d like people to understand better, I wouldn’t wish a single concussion on anyone, much less multiple concussions. 

If you’ve never had a concussion and would like to understand it better, read Impact, starting with Julia Nunes’ excellent essay, “The Next Hit.”

And if you’ve had a concussion and would like to see your experiences reflected accurately on a page, read Impact, starting with Julia Nunes’ excellent essay, “The Next Hit.”

Here are other books from the prolific graduating class of 2016:

The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest, by Helena Moncrieff

The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons, by Suzanne Stewart

Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis, by Andrew Reeves

One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir, by S. Lesley Buxton

A Cure for Heartache: Life’s Simple Pleasures, One Moment at a Time, by MJ Grant. Review coming soon.

Winter in the City of Light: A Search for Self in Retirement, by Sue Harper

Conspiracy of Hope: The Truth About Breast Cancer Screening, by Renée Pellerin 

Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures, by Moira Dann

Press Enter to Continue: Scribes from Babylon to Silicon, by Joan Francuz

Sit Still and Prosper: How a Former Money Manager Discovered the Path to Investing with Greater Clarity, Calmness, and Confidence, by Stephanie Griffiths. Review coming soon.

A Distorted Revolution: How Eric’s Trip Changed Music, Moncton and Me, by Jason Murray. Review coming soon.

No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs, by Lezlie Lowe

Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, by Jessica McDiarmid

F-Bomb: Dispatches from the War on Feminism, by Lauren McKeon