Brain on Fire

I really didn't care for this book. It's a fascinating story about a woman who suffers from what is unclear at first, but what it turns out to be is what twists and turns her mind into something else altogether.

The most interesting aspect of the book is that she cannot remember what happened when her mind went off the tracks for a month, and as a journalist she sets out to recreate and rediscover what happened to her.

But for some reason that episode remains unintegrated into the rest of the author's life, or so it seems. It's as if you spent several hundred pages reading a book in which the author skirts the subject, simply staring at it from far away, never reengaging it in a way that transforms her wholly. Perhaps this is the complication of the brain.

I certainly experienced a very minor version of this at one point in my life. And one thing I learned is that it's very difficult to be objective about a thing when the sick thing is the thing itself.

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