UNFIXED

A debut memoirist’s life is turned upside down by a devastating medical diagnosis and the revelation of a family secret.

In 2014, Warner fractured her pelvis during a bicycle accident. The immobilizing injury, she writes, was “just the beginning of [her] profound state of undoing.” Shortly after the accident, she would be diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder—Mal de Débarquement Syndrome—which she describes as a type of vertigo in which her brain perceives solid ground as water. Feeling “out at sea, bobbing, sinking,” the author would also become psychologically unmoored after learning that the man she had grown up calling “dad” was not her biological father (who died in a shipwreck on Lake Michigan). Her medical condition, combined with the revelation of her true parentage, prompted Warner to look back at her life, from her childhood to her obsessive skin-picking as a teenager, through a new lens. While the book has the hallmarks of a traditional memoir, including autobiographical vignettes and intimate reflections, the work’s genre-defying form makes it unique—the text includes reconstructed scenes that take place before Warner was born, original poetry, and letters written to her biological father. The book’s opening chapter reads like a scene from a novel, with detailed descriptions of the moment in 1974 when the author’s mother first met Warner’s charismatic biological father, Charlie, and her parents’ open marriage (prompted by her father’s infidelity). Perhaps the most poignant elements are the author’s letters to Charlie, dated from various points in her life (from childhood through adolescence into adulthood), and in which she reconstructs her past with knowledge of Charlie’s existence. Reminiscing about a childhood memory of Lake Michigan, she writes in one letter, “I pictured my refuge at the bottom of the lake…I didn’t know you were already there.” Both accessible and poignant, this is a powerful reflection on identity, memory, and family.

A gripping, often literary memoir that ruminates on life’s unfixable complications.