Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery

Winner of the Stonewall Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award

This powerful and deeply personal memoir in essays ＂reflects on history, philosophy, and love while living with head trauma＂ (The New York Times Book Review).

＂An infuriatingly gorgeous, important book.＂ --Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties * ＂A riveting book about embodiment, pain, identity, and intimacy...this book is a stunning achievement.＂ --Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood

After suffering multiple concussions in her thirties, Annie Liontas shares what it means to be one of the ＂walking wounded＂ in Sex with a Brain Injury. Facing her fear, her rage, her physical suffering, and the effects of head trauma on her marriage and other relationships, Liontas is forced to reckon with her own queer mother’s battle with addiction and finds echoes in their pain. Liontas weaves history, philosophy, and personal accounts to interrogate and expand representations of mental health, ability, and disability--particularly in relation to women and the LGBT community. She uncovers the surprising legacy of brain injury, examining its role in culture, the criminal justice system, and through historical figures like Henry VIII and Harriet Tubman. Through Liontas’s sharp, affecting prose, we can imagine this kind of pain, and having to claw one’s way back to a new normal. The hidden gift of injury, Liontas writes, is the ability to connect with others.

For the millions of people who have suffered from concussions and for those who have endeavored to support loved ones through the painful and often baffling experience of head trauma, this intimate memoir of a profound affliction and resilience...stands as testimony to love and patience＂ (Kirkus Reviews).

Annie Liontas is the author of the novel Let Me Explain You and the coeditor of A Manner of Being: Writers on their Mentors. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Gay Magazine, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Believer, Guernica, McSweeney’s, and other publications. A graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program, she is a professor of writing at George Washington University. Annie has served as a mentor for Pen City’s incarcerated writers and helped secure a Mellon Foundation grant on Disability Justice to bring storytelling to communities in the criminal justice system. She lives in Philadelphia.