Sex with a Brain Injury

“Reflects on history, philosophy and love while living with head trauma.” —The New York Times Book Review “An intimate memoir of a profound affliction and resilience…Liontas offers frank reflections on the physical, emotional, and cognitive consequences of her injuries…stands as testimony to love and patience.” —Kirkus “These unflinching and eye-opening essays wow at every turn.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review “A personal history of what happens when our physical relationships with many of the things we know and love—our families, delicious food, and, yes, even sex—evolve beyond our control.” —SELF Magazine “This is an infuriatingly gorgeous, important book and Liontas is a singular writer.” —Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties “Sex With a Brain Injury is a rhythmic genre-bender: Maggie Nelson meets concussion; Olivia Laing of the walking wounded. Annie Liontas writes like an alchemist, braiding humor, humanity, and history into the personal narrative of her injuries and healing. I loved this book.” —Melissa Broder, author of Death Valley “A riveting book about embodiment, pain, identity, and intimacy. Sex with a Brain Injury rings with the honesty, humor, and intelligence of all my favorite books and is among the best examples of ethical personal writing that I’ve ever encountered. Annie Liontas is a treasure and this book is a stunning achievement.” —Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood “A gorgeous, passionate book about the ways we fight to find intimacy across the different realities of our bodies and brains and lives. What a difficult miracle this is to pull off! And yet— we know it is possible because Liontas does it here: in chapter after breathless chapter she connects with the reader through her powers of art and language and feeling, bringing us ever closer to her experience and understanding of brain injury and the larger historical and cultural scope of it, too. How lucky we are for this gripping, moving, and necessary memoir.” —CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife “I’m in awe of Annie Liontas’s Sex with a Brain Injury for a hundred reasons, not the least of which is its resistance to abstract language, which is another way to say its commitment to writing through the immediacy of sinew, nerve, blood, and bone. On top of that it’s funny, tender, hopeful, and disarmingly intimate with a charisma so bright it leaves sparks flying in its wake. In short, a classic.” —Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World “In Sex with a Brain Injury Annie Liontas has written a guidebook to falling back in love with the unruly body. Liontas renders the intimacy and terror of life after brain injury in rapturous prose, cracking open their own story and those of others who live with invisible, often disbelieved suffering. Yet amid the pain, Liontas excavates moments of bodily delight so sensual they gave me goosebumps. This book is a revelation, a cold compress on anything that aches—the mind, certainly, but also the heart and soul. A sensational read.” —Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches “Sex with a Brain Injury succeeds in extraordinary, unfamiliar ways. Memories are rendered like snapshots—vivid, sharply and wonderfully strange, full of voids; pieced together, they form a tapestry of questions: what does true intimacy look like? What are the margins of illness, and how, too, is illness spacious, illuminating? With the chorus of other writers, scholars, and myriad artistic sources, Annie Liontas turns these questions over like a stone in their hand; multi-faceted, full of nuance, dazzling. Delightfully weaving humor with horror, Liontas brilliantly articulates what it is like to reach for cohesion, linearity, sense, and how it feels to do so with pleasure. An unforgettable read.” —T Kira Mahealani Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls “A most extraordinary lesson in compassion… Annie Liontas has captured the truths known mostly to survivors of brain injury. Hers is a visceral, bracing account of the aftermath of injury and the war she fought to make meaning of suffering and reclaim her life. People with any manner of invisible health conditions will see themselves in and through Annie’s writing; people who have been dismissed, discounted, or degraded by the systems of care that should have offered relief. A celebration of the complexities of vulnerability, this book is required reading for everyone with a brain, injured or otherwise. A triumph.” —Dr. Kim Gorgens, neuropsychologist & TED Speaker

Annie Liontas is the genderqueer 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, Gay Magazine, NPR, 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.

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