A young woman’s quest for meaning and purpose takes a catastrophic turn when she is injured in a motorcycle taxi accident in Uganda and slips into a coma. It is not clear whether she will live – and if so, in what state. A tornado has ripped through her brain. Miraculously, Tarini Mohan opens her eyes three months later in a Delhi hospital, with many impairments – but with her long-term memory intact. Her parents have their daughter back.

As she begins to grasp the extent of her physical and cognitive difficulties, twenty-four-year-old Tarini is in turmoil. She writes: “This wasn’t who I’d been, wasn’t who I was inside, or who I wanted to be. I didn’t want to live curled up on my parents, or anyone else’s lap.” This book is her wise, warm, honest, and funny account of how she regains control of her life. The beauty of this book is that Tarini never lets you pity her. She just draws you into her world as she learns to live her life on new terms; whether it is getting through the daily grind of therapies or handling relationships that have become infinitely more tangled, especially the one with her long-term partner, Nikhil.

What shines through is that even after a “lifequake”, Tarini remains much the same: outgoing, spirited, tenacious, and determined to wrest joy and meaning from life. “For the gregarious,” Tarini writes, reflecting on her difficulties with speech, “a brief moment of repetition is a small price to pay for being heard.”