HOWARD ENGEL ON ALEXIA June 28, 2010
Posted by thenaturalist in Journals, Memory Books, Reading, Writing.add a comment
In July 2001, Canadian writer Howard Engel suffered a stroke that resulted in alexia — an inability to recognize written language — but he could still write. While he was in the rehab hospital, one of the therapists suggested that he keep a “memory book.” As a lifelong keeper of journals, Howard was delighted by this idea. He says, “I learned to write things down in the ‘memory book’ the moment I thought of them…. The memory book gave a lift to my sense of being in the driver’s seat of my life. It became my constant companion: part diary, part appointment book, part commonplace book. Hospitals, to a degree breed a passive spirit; the memory book returned a piece of myself to me.” In 2005, Howard published a new novel called Memory Book, and in 2007 he published a memoir, which he called The Man Who Forgot How to Read. (Background information from Oliver Sacks’ “A Neurologist’s Notebook: A Man of Letters,” The New Yorker, June 28, 2010)
