CHASE THE LIGHT

A man describes his recovery from a body-shattering accident in this debut memoir.

Perez had it all. He’d made it from poor immigrant kid to successful, educated adult, with a gym-sculpted physique, a promising acting career, and a girlfriend he loved. Then a chance car accident changed the course of his life. “By all accounts, I shouldn’t still be walking this earth,” he writes. “By most accounts, I shouldn’t even be walking. I coded several times that night, which means my heart stopped and the paramedics had to revive me. You’ll understand when you see pictures of my car after the accident.” (The photographs, both of the author and his vehicle, are indeed shocking.) His left femur was snapped in two. His right arm was paralyzed. Every bone in his face was broken. Perhaps worst of all, he suffered a severe brain injury. The outlook was not sunny. His acting career was over and his girlfriend left him soon after the accident. But rather than wither away, Perez was determined to learn to talk, eat, and walk again. This memoir recounts his three-year process of learning to live again, with all the feelings of grief, hope, and confusion he experienced along the way. The author’s prose rarely strays from its confident, inspirational register, though he often delivers moments of clear-eyed lyricism: “All I did was stare at the ceiling as I lay on the couch that night. It was summertime, a reminder that time had not stopped. It kept moving forward and that was all I was trying to do, but change was slower for me, and the days drew on forever.” It’s a stirring account, one that—like the crash—strips bare the fault lines in Perez’s life. The loss of his career paled against the distress felt by his parents, and his heartache over his girlfriend seems to have eaten at him just as much as his physical pain. Readers facing all manner of obstacles will feel uplifted by the author’s determination to recover all that he could.

A candid and moving account about rebuilding a life after a terrible car crash.