On TBI, Family, and Empathy
One of the proposal pieces for submitting my book to publishers includes the “books that compete with or compare to” the book I’ve written. This assignment is one of the harder proposal bits for me to accomplish, not least of all because my book about my brother is different—different genre(s), different style and tone, different thrust—from any I’ve been yet come across. And also because I have to read enough of each one to know how my book compares or competes, which takes some time as well as thought.
The book I’m reading now is called He Never Liked Cake, by Janna Leyde. Janna’s father survived a brain injury when she was fourteen years old. She writes of her alienation from her “new” father—the man her father became after his injury: a man who was impulsive, compulsive, erratic, apathetic, irresponsible, and at times hostile and aggressive (but, fortunately, not physically violent).
I’m currently on page 249 of the 402-page book. I understand how Janna’s father’s brain injury blew up her world when she was a young teenager. I understand the resentment she developed—as a teenager, I resented my own father, who had his own issues (as everyone does) but didn’t display the array of difficult syndromes that accompany TBI. When I was twenty-two, I joined the Navy mostly to escape Dan’s situation, because after his injury I was heartbroken and couldn’t bear to be in presence because of the struggles his brokenness created for him. Had he been my father instead of my brother, and had I been eight years younger, would I have resented him? Would I have seen him only as the cause of my problems, without registering that he was, at least also, the bearer of his own?
Maybe so. But as my 65-year-old self, I find myself reacting to Janna’s attitude with exasperation and sadness. I’m more than halfway through the book, and she hasn’t yet expressed any understanding or sympathy for her father. His life was changed at least as radically as hers was, and the struggles he went through post-accident were at least as difficult as hers.
Janna does a great job of conveying the pain and disruption that TBI causes family members. What has been missing so far is empathy for her father. I’m hoping that, in both her book and her life, Janna arrives at some point at which she acknowledges that her father’s struggle has been as difficult, as distressing, and as worthy of empathy as her own. I hope she attends to her father’s confusion, sorrow, and sense of disruption at losing not only his own identity but also his role in his family and his place in their affections following his accident. I hope she appreciates that the hardships that followed in the wake of his accident were at least as intense and distressing as her own. I hope that the second part of her book finds some pages to focus on her father’s broad and multidimensional losses. But so far, there’s not much indication that she’s aware of them, much less taking them into account in her relationship with him, and little foreshadowing in the book to suggest that, by page 402, she will.
At this point, I’m still reading only because I’m hoping she does.
Update: At page 356, she does, as she begins to teach her father yoga. (Maybe sincerely trying to help him was the key.)