Sonya Lea

In exploring her husband's traumatic brain injury and loss of memory, Sonya Lea has written a memoir that is both a powerful look at perseverance in the face of trauma and a surprising exploration into what lies beyond our fragile identities. In the twenty-third year of their marriage, Sonya Lea’s husband, Richard, went in for surgery to treat a rare appendix cancer. When he came out, he had no recollection of their life together: how they met, their wedding day, the births of their two children. All of it was gone, along with the rockier parts of their past—her drinking, his anger. Richard could now hardly speak, emote, or create memories from moment to moment. Who he’d been no longer was. Wondering Who You Are braids the story of Sonya and Richard’s relationship, those memories that he could no longer conjure, together with his fateful days in the hospital—the internal bleeding, the near-death experience, and eventual traumatic brain injury. It follows the couple through his recovery as they struggle with his treatment, and through a marriage no longer grounded on decades of shared experience. As they build a fresh life together, as Richard develops a new personality, Sonya is forced to question her own assumptions, beliefs, and desires, her place in the marriage and her way of being in the world. With radical candor and honesty, Sonya Lea has written a memoir that is both a powerful look at perseverance in the face of trauma and a surprising exploration into what lies beyond our fragile identities.

Wondering Who You Are: A Memoir

Lisa Iversen

Karin Konstantynowicz

Anne Hayden

Una O'Connell

Summer Starr

June BlueSpruce

Sabine Olsen

Carole Harmon

Christina Greené

Sharon Halfnight

Pam Emerson

For over two decades, family constellations facilitator and therapist Lisa Iversen has been working with groups, including the descendants of those who have perpetrated harm or been victimized in circumstances of injustice. Here she brings together a collection of twelve essays written by white women cultivating consciousness on the role of whiteness in the collective movements of immigration, colonialism, slavery, and war. Their stories disentangle themes of innocence, grief, race, privilege, and belonging in their families and ancestries.Essays written by Sonya Lea, Karin Konstantynowicz, Anne Hayden, Summer Starr, Kate Regan, June BlueSpruce, Sabine Olsen, Carole Harmon, Christina Greené, Sharon Halfnight, Una Suseli O'Connell, and Pam Emerson.Lisa Iversen, MSW, LCSW, lives in the Pacific Northwest where she directs the Center for Ancestral Blueprints. She is the author of the book, Ancestral Blueprints: Revealing Invisible Truths in America's Soul.

Sonya Lea

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