The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life after Brain Damage

Former Deadspin writer Magary (The Hike) delivers a thrilling account of the harrowing near-death experience that changed his life. In December 2018, after hosting the Deadspin Awards in New York City, Magary had an inexplicable fainting spell that fractured the temporal bone in his skull, causing him to need life-saving brain surgery and to be placed in a medically induced coma for two weeks. “The world had gone missing to me,” he writes, “I was not here. But everyone I cared about was.” After three weeks of “learning to live upright again,” he went home to his wife and three kids in Maryland, but, instead of returning to normalcy, Magary discovered he’d lost hearing in one ear, as well as his sense of smell and taste, and spiraled into a depression. Though his story seems ripe for cynicism, he relays it with compassion and humor, as he recounts fighting “bravely against orthopedic sex swings,” and his struggle to “snatch back pieces of [his] old existence.” Magary did regain some of his hearing and his taste, but the real recovery story here is the path he found to accepting his new self, as a man living with disabilities and a newfound “reverence” for “everyday dad moments.” Exquisitely painful, this work brims with hope. (Oct.)