BY ACCIDENT

Illness, injury, and loss prompt a search for equanimity in this debut memoir.

Greene, a former radio host and producer, has had her share of life-upending experiences. Her memoir opens with “ear-splitting cacophony…wild, uncontrolled movement.” In 2012, she was hit by a car while at a crosswalk, resulting in several pelvic fractures and a long road to recovery. Around the same time, she navigated a colon cancer diagnosis and, later, another cancer scare, and even weathered a major hurricane while on a trip to Mexico. Yet, beyond recounting the details of these destabilizing events, she’s concerned with charting a subtler, internal change in this book. For Greene, the car accident was “a sudden graphic stop to my constantly in-motion existence, my need to produce and achieve to feel worthy of love, my need to control everything because I’ve believed that it would make me safer.” The long stretches of time suddenly opened up by injury recovery brought her memories of lost family members, and she brought the knowledge she gained from moving through grief to the newfound challenges of daily life with debilitating injury. As with so many memoirs, affirmations and clearly articulated lessons pepper the text, and one may wonder if there’s a risk that the writing’s therapeutic function will overtake the task of literary creation. Still, Greene’s unadorned, straightforward prose keeps readers rooted in her lively narrative of hardship and recovery, and her mantras may prove useful for those going through similar experiences. Most refreshingly, she manages to paint a naturalistic portrait of the rhythms of life between tests and diagnoses, as well as the anxieties and insecurities that come with recognizing a fundamental dependence on others.

A clearsighted reflection on the need to let go in the face of uncertainty.