The Beginning Of Everything

About a month before I finished The Beginning of Everything—which was about three weeks after the book was technically due to my editor—my roof started leaking in a place where it had previously been patched. I was right then in the process of writing about my slow and ongoing recovery from a spontaneous spinal CSF leak (in which a tear in the dura mater, the tough membrane covering the brain and spinal cord, led to my cerebrospinal fluid leaking out)—in particular the terrifying uncertainty about whether or not the patching I’d had done would hold, and whether my leak would recur months or even years after the leaky place had been fixed.

The slow, inexorable drip of rainwater from the ceiling in the corner of my bedroom, just beneath a place where the roof had been patched years earlier, was almost hilarious in its obviousness.

This may be a bit on-the-nose as a metaphor, but that doesn’t mean it’s a warning, I tried to reassure myself as I tried to find ways to stop the drip, mopping it up from the inside, rigging ways of blocking it from the outside.

It’s hard not to read into your life, or, I should say, it’s hard for me not to read into mine, especially after having spent the better part of 2017 trying to write about my life in a way that could be readable for someone else. And yet if I’ve learned anything from the process of trying to provide a narrative for an experience that seemed to exist outside of one—from revisiting the time when I was ill, stuck in bed, searching my painful, foggy brain fruitlessly for clues I had surely missed, messages that would have saved me had I only recognized their importance, had I been smart enough to heed them—it’s that there really is no foreshadowing, no metaphor, no narrative arc, other than that which we impose on events afterwards, to make sense of them.

Still, this previously-fixed-but-now-leaking-again-roof metaphor was a rhyme that was hard to ignore, as I raced to meet both my already over-extended deadline and the two-year anniversary of my spinal CSF leak having been patched. Would writing the end of this book actually signify the end of this particular chapter in my life? Would it really, finally be over? Or would I instead be like my roof, leaking again at some future, unknown, especially inconvenient time? Part of living with illness is learning to live with uncertainty, and part of meeting an already missed deadline is just keeping on writing, whether it seems pointless or portentous. So I decided this leaky roof was just a leaky roof. I returned to my manuscript. I kept going.

The Beginning of Everything was published in April 2018, just a few months past the two-year anniversary of my spinal CSF leak being patched. Two years seems like a very long time, and yet it also seems like nothing. Perhaps because the process of writing the book required a kind of reliving of it, it all feels very immediate, like I’m still in the middle of it, like no time has passed at all. I spent that first year of my recovery, 2016, my Year Zero, rebuilding, resting, eventually using piano practice as a kind of neurological rehab, physical therapy for my brain. And then the next year—2017, Year One—healing through the work of narrative, putting a wordless time into words, finally giving a context to an experience I hadn’t been able to contextualize until now.

As I begin Year Two, it still feels like a gift, like a lucky break, to be upright and free of pain and able to write again, as frustrated as I am occasionally by the still-present limitations of my post-leak life. It’s exciting to be here, even though it’s also tentative and scary, even though my life hastens to remind me from time to time via over-the-top metaphor that the possibility of leaking again in the place that was supposedly fixed still exists. But I am equipped with more than metaphor now, and I know where to go, who to see, what to do, if it should all fall apart again, if my work inside and out isn’t enough to stop the inevitable.

Seven months or so into my spinal CSF leak, when I was in constant pain and unable to think, one of my neurologists told me, “Maybe someday you’ll write a book about this.” That felt so far-fetched and hopeless at the time, it seemed almost cruel, although I knew it was meant to be encouraging. And yet here I am. That someday is now. And I’m ready for the beginning of everything that comes next.

—
Andrea J. Buchanan is a New York Times bestselling author whose latest book is THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING (Pegasus, 2018). Her other work includes the multimedia young adult novel GIFT, the internationally bestselling THE DARING BOOK FOR GIRLS, her essay collection on early motherhood MOTHER SHOCK: LOVING EVERY (OTHER) MINUTE OF IT, and seven other books. Before becoming a writer, Andi trained as a pianist, earning a bachelor of music degree in piano performance from the Boston Conservatory of Music and a master’s in piano performance from the San Francisco Conservatory. Her last recital was at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall. She lives with her family in Philadelphia. Visit her online at www.andibuchanan.com.

THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING

A real-life neurological mystery and captivating story of reinvention by the New York Times bestselling author of The Daring Book for Girls.

Andrea Buchanan lost her mind while crossing the street one blustery March morning. The cold winter air triggered a coughing fit, and she began to choke. She was choking on a lot that day. A sick son. A pending divorce. The guilt of failing as a partner and as a mother. When the coughing finally stopped, she thought it was over. She could not have been more wrong.

When she coughed that morning, a small tear ripped through her dura mater, the membrane covering the brain and spinal cord. But she didn’t know that yet. Instead, Andrea went on with her day, unaware that her cerebrospinal fluid was already beginning to leak out of that tiny opening.

What followed was nine months of pain and confusion as her brain, no longer cushioned by a healthy waterbed of fluid, sank in her skull. At a time in her life when she needed to be as clear-thinking as possible as a writer, as a mother, as a woman attempting to strike out on her own after two decades of marriage she was plagued by cognitive impairment and constant pain, trapped by her own brain―all while mystifying doctors and pushing the limits of medical understanding.

In this luminous and moving narrative, Andrea reveals the astonishing story of this tumultuous year―her fraught search for treatment; how patients, especially women, fight to be seen as reliable narrators of their own experiences; and how her life-altering recovery process affected both her and her family.

The mind-brain connection is one of the greatest mysteries of the human condition. In some folklore, the cerebrospinal fluid around the brain is thought to be the place where consciousness actually begins. Here, in the pages of The Beginning of Everything, Andrea seeks to understand: Where was “I” when I wasn’t there?

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing