I wanted to return to Montréal. Photograph the impractical spiral staircases clinging to narrow brick houses. Dance around drifts of cottonwood fluff, order coffee in French so terrible that the barista responds in English.
I wasn’t going to Montréal. I was packing from the hospital-provided list, ignoring all recommendations except the button-down shirts. That’s a solid tip, because once the electrodes are attached, you cannot pull a shirt over your head. Instead of the suggested jigsaw puzzle, I packed two books for each day I’d be hospitalized.
Cramming ten books into an overnight bag takes effort. I thought about Colin Craven in The Secret Garden, traveling the world via books while on miserable bedrest. As a child I had loved that book, but when it was given to my own kids, I’d winced. Any book written at the height of the British Empire has its issues. Flipping through, I’d searched for Dickon and his robin, only to find Colin and his books. Young me had absorbed the obvious lesson here, that cranky, unpleasant Colin is healed by the magical garden.
That’s not quite what the book says. Colin is an effeminate “hysteric” who “might live if he would make up his mind to it.” His problems are all in his head, which is the book’s way of saying they are make-believe, but not the beautiful make-believe the children engage in outdoors. Dickon, a lower-class creature of the moors, is the brilliant foil to Colin’s privileged failure.
I put the book down because part of me was starting to agree. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with Colin. Maybe his “fright and illness” was an overreaction. What if I wasn’t trying hard enough to be well? I lay awake the night before my admission, a lunar eclipse darkening my bedroom, the book’s tendrils deep in my brain.
My room at the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit was on the eleventh floor, directly below the helicopter pad. Splashed low on one wall was a brownish-red stain, and the list of items that didn’t work properly included the door, sink, chair, bed, and thermostat. The room had a long, narrow window featuring a slice of Hartford and sky. The Craven country estate it was not.
COVID and childcare limitations meant I was alone, except for the twenty-four-hour video recording and medical staff. A serious fall risk, I wasn’t al-lowed to stand on my own. The EEG technician attached twenty-five electrodes with a glue that eventually pulled skin off my face.
Without my anti-epileptic medications, my brain began to fray, and it was time to become Colin. I opened Anthony Veasna So’s Afterparties, headed to California via short stories. My door kept swinging open without warning. Someone punctured my vein for blood as I read about Cambodian refugees and the complexity of inherited trauma. Someone told me I was anemic but clean, my blood free of illegal substances. I read about drug use and reincarnation. Someone readjusted my electrodes.
As soon as I finished, I moved on to Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby, losing myself in New York to block out the EMU’s unsettling air of anticipation. The neurologist had ordered sleep deprivation to provoke a seizure, and Peters’ writing was addictive enough to keep me awake. The gap, the tension between who you are and who you long to become—is it possible to write about anything else? I was still reading the next morning when the neurologist said the EEG hadn’t captured anything useful. Then she pointed to the book, said she’d loved it.
My brain transitioned from frayed to tattered. During a seizure years earlier, I had stopped breathing and turned blue. Avoiding looking at the resuscitation kit slumped by the broken sink, I began Hiromi Kawakami’s People from My Neighborhood, a linked story collection. I wasn’t up to following the threads, so I focused on each story individually and let Kawakami’s strange magic take control. A town with an epidemic of pigeonitis, where victims begin to coo, eat bugs, and lose “the power to think ahead.” A woman with puddles and tadpoles on her feet, a man with two shadows, one of which was rebellious. I read the stories as if they were nonfiction, as if they contained answers to questions I might have later.
When I looked up, I could watch my brain waves scrolling across the monitor. Every few hours alarms and footsteps sounded, someone else having a seizure. I was Mary, listening to Colin’s cries in the distance. I was Jane Eyre, sensing a mysterious stranger’s hidden pain.
“You read a lot. Are you a student?” the nurse asked, pointing to The Fell, by Sarah Moss. My finger served as a bookmark while we waited for the blood-pressure monitor.
“No,” I said. She frowned.
The machine beeped and the nurse left. I went back to the protagonist, Kate, in the wilds of Britain’s Peak District, where she has sneaked away from the restrictions of quarantine for fresh air. Alone as night approaches, she falls and is brutally injured. Take that, Colin Craven. Nature kills more than it heals.
The Fell is a fast read, and before long I switched to the fraught Alabama of Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom. The protagonist Gifty is studying addiction and depression in the brains of mice, hoping for clues to her brother’s overdose death. Gifty’s mother is mired in grief and depression, refusing to leave Gifty’s cramped bedroom for the bright world outside.
Coming off my medications leads to intense mood swings, and I became convinced that Gyasi understood me in a deep, fundamental way. We could be friends. Best friends! I too have a brain, I wanted to tell Gyasi. Here is my brain, laid bare like a mouse’s. See its peaks and valleys, how the waves smooth when I absorb the compassion you show your characters.
Strapped into the chair for another lonely afternoon, I read Stanley Craw-ford’s Log of the S. S. Mrs Unguentine. The novella is set on an endless ocean at the end of the world, where a woman and her abusive husband are adrift on a barge that hosts an Edenic garden full of MacGyvered contraptions. The husband desires total control of barge and wife, an impossibility. I felt as if I was floating. Often my brain would travel elsewhere, unbidden. I lost time and found myself staring into space.
“Still no seizures,” the neurologist said. My brain was out of reach, even with constant monitoring. Brain as unreliable narrator. Brain as adventurer.
In Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither, an outcast man adopts a problematic one-eyed dog. The dog adores the old man but attacks everyone else. The pair eventually flee, roaming rural Ireland as the plot turns gloriously dark. No one learns a good lesson in the end. As I finished reading, a young nurse peered at the cover. “Is it about a dog?”
“Yes,” I said, although that’s debatable.
“I love reading about dogs,” she said. I thought, then you should probably not read this.
My last night, I plunged into Mari-lynne Robinson’s essay collection, What Are We Doing Here? It felt apropos. Four days and no observable seizures. I was defeated, exhausted, and constantly on the verge of vomiting. My vision was blurred, I had trouble speaking and remembering words, and I’d had a migraine for days.
“Sleep deprivation tonight!” said the neurologist.
No offense to Robinson, but I remember nothing about those essays. Eyes skimmed words, fingers turned pages, but brain was elsewhere, ungovernable. I imagine the video footage of my earnest striving is disturbing. Maybe if I just tried a little harder to be well.
Two books remained on discharge day. Waiting for a breakfast that never came, I began Bette Howland’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage. I wrote myself a note: Howland’s writing is like water, filling the container of each story. I’ve retained flashes of these stories—a funeral in Chicago, Jewish families, a desperate woman in a foreign country with a sick child.
Unleashed from electrodes, IV, EKG, and chair seatbelt, I left the hospital clutching Tessa Hadley’s Free Love. At home, adjusting to my increased medication, I visited 1960s London, desperate to believe the promise of reinvention that Phyllis chases through the novel. That gap again, between my body and my dreams.
In the months since, I think of Colin Craven whenever I end up in furious tears, certain that if I just push through my symptoms I’ll end up somewhere worthwhile. This is never true. I think of all the children who have absorbed Colin’s message in the last hundred years. The Secret Garden, a book that insists book knowledge is no substitute for the real thing.
I think Frances Hodgson Burnett was wrong, but either way she is dead and I am not. Today I cannot pilot my car across the wide glacier-scoured plains that lie between me and Montréal, a city that blooms like magic. Some days I can’t even get to my garden, but I can open a book. My fingers turn the pages and my brain does its best to come along. When it chooses to travel elsewhere, I let it go. One day we’ll arrive in Montréal together. Bonjour, we’ll say. Où est la bibliothèque?
Sarah Starr Murphy is a teacher, writer, and editor in rural Connecticut.
