alix kates shulman

One day it happens, the dreaded thing that will change your life forever, the more dreadful because, though you've half expected it, you don't know what form it will take or when it will come, and whether you will rise to the challenge. For Alix it happened on July 22, 2004, at two a.m. on a coastal Maine island in a remote seaside cabin where she woke to find that her beloved husband had fallen nine feet from their sleeping loft and was lying deathly still on the floor below. Though he would survive, he suffered an injury that left him seriously brain impaired.

Each of us has imagined just such an event outside of our control that will permanently alter the course of our lives. In this elegant memoir, Shulman describes life on the other side: the ongoing anxieties, risks, and surprising rewards she experiences as she reorganizes her world and her priorities to care for her husband and discovers that what may have seemed a grim life-sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich.

Forthcoming in September 2008 from FSG.

"An extraordinary and important book....Shulman with elegance and deep insight moves between the past and the present, and magically unites them. TO LOVE WHAT IS celebrates the deep resilience of self, and the power of a loving relationship." Oliver Sacks, MD

"This is the story of great love forged when death almost parts you and then doesn't, a book that will take its place next to those slender volumes that become tattered and torn as I read and reread and reread, as if my own life depended on it...Shulman's masterpiece." Honor Moore, author of The Bishop's Daughter

"Hope, fear, rage, guilt, the powerful endurance of love--it's all laid naked on the page, and every word rings true." Martha Weinman Lear, author of Heartsounds

"A new kind of love story, as moving as any I've ever read." Rebecca Goldstein, author of The Mind Body Problem