Did you catch the LIVE I did with Alisa Kennedy Jones yesterday? If not, here it is:
It was a blast. Alisa has become a friend and colleague, but way before I knew her I fell in love with her memoir, Gotham Girl Interrupted: My Misadventures in Motherhood, Romance, and Epilepsy
Alisa writes like she’s talking right at you, her brilliant brain firing on all cylinders and then some. I knew nothing about epilepsy before I picked up this book, and her electric prose changed my world. Take this, for example…
What I saw was all the light in the universe, even the little bits you cannot see, a hundred thousand sparklers from a galaxy far, far away. Not entirely blinding, but close. In it I could feel the universe eddying like a fast-flowing river of stars. … Like being trapped in the Van Gogh painting, Starry Night in swift, oceanic motion, but it was more than light. It was a feeling of transcendence, of unstoppable ecstasy, accompanied by divine, chromatic effects: a rapturous, paradisiacal stillness and glow. Amid the rushing of countless points of white light, I felt myself wrestling blindly for this luminous new inner geography, to get back from it and put words around it, to observe it. All I could get out, or hear myself say was, “It’s a lightning storm in my head.” No deep, jack Handy thoughts. Nothing profound. Just star stuff. It was unbearably bright and impossibly close, but still, I didn’t want it to stop because it was beautiful. Ecstatic even. It was the electric.
Anyone who’s experienced that and returned to tell the tale gets my vote. I picked up her memoir and was let in to her world of stars and broken bones and it was the ecstasy and catastrophe that told me I could trust her. As she goes on to say in our conversation, for a long while, the seizures identified her completely. She was an epileptic rather than a person with epilepsy. Now, fifteen years on, she lives with it and lives her life. She chooses the full life experience. Hot sauce and ice cream. Yes please.
Eleanor
