DIVINE INTERVENTION

A memoir of one family’s struggles with numerous medical issues in the mid-2000s.

From 2005 to 2007, Kodiad worked stressful, 18-hour days as the owner of an orthotic/prosthetic facility in South Florida, traveling back and forth from his home in the small town of Jasper, Georgia, where he’d moved his wife, daughter, and mother-in-law to give them a calmer life than they found in Florida. The two-year period ended with the author having a mental breakdown and threatening to jump off of a 13-story building, with police and news crews nearby. Following those dramatic events, the author moved permanently to Georgia and gave his wife “what she really wanted and deserved—a divorce.” The two remained friends, however, even after Kodiad fell in love with and married Kanyon, a local teacher and cheerleading coach who had two young children. Kodiad’s brother, Robert, moved to Georgia from North Carolina, but soon suffered a life-threatening vertebrae injury—one of several excruciating medical ordeals that befell the author and his family members, including his mother, his father, Kanyon, and Kanyon’s daughter, Brayly, the last of whom dealt with a dangerous misdiagnosis after a scan discovered a spot on her brain. Kodiad asserts that it must have been “divine intervention” that drove him to tell his story—a term that gives the work its title; he says he wrote it while feeling inexplicably like “an eighteen-year-old on an eight ball of cocaine.” The prose does have tremendous energy, especially in early chapters detailing his breakdown, which he narrates swiftly and with sharp, self-deprecating wit. However, this same energy leads him to jump around in time and go off on tangents, and, as a result, it can be hard to follow such basics as where people live or when certain events happened. That said, Kodiad holds nothing back in this remembrance, which includes some graphic medical details, and he manages to pack a lot of candor into a brief book.

A frank, but sometimes-disorganized, account of mental and physical illnesses.