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The Night the Lights Went Out
Cover of The Night the Lights Went Out
The Night the Lights Went Out
A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage
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A fascinating, darkly funny comeback story of learning to live with a broken mind after a near-fatal traumatic brain injury—from the acclaimed author of The Hike
“Drew Magary has produced a remarkable account of his journey, one that is filled with terror, tenderness, beauty, and grace.”—David Grann, bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon
Drew Magary, fan-favorite Defector and former Deadspin columnist, is known for his acerbic takes and his surprisingly nuanced chronicling of his own life. But in The Night the Lights Went Out, he finds himself far out of his depths. On the night of the 2018 Deadspin Awards, he suffered a mysterious fall that caused him to smash his head so hard on a cement floor that he cracked his skull in three places and suffered a catastrophic brain hemorrhage. For two weeks, he remained in a coma. The world was gone to him, and him to it.
In his long recovery from his injury, including understanding what his family and friends went through as he lay there dying, coming to terms with his now permanent disabilities, and trying to find some lesson in this cosmic accident, he leaned on the one sure thing that he knows and that didn't leave him—his writing.
Drew takes a deep dive into what it meant to be a bystander to his own death and figuring out who this new Drew is: a Drew that doesn't walk as well, doesn't taste or smell or see or hear as well, and a Drew that is often failing as a husband and a father as he bounces between grumpiness, irritability, and existential fury. But what's a good comeback story without heartbreak? Eager to get back what he lost, Drew experiences an awakening of a whole other kind in this incredibly funny, medically illuminating, and heartfelt memoir.
A fascinating, darkly funny comeback story of learning to live with a broken mind after a near-fatal traumatic brain injury—from the acclaimed author of The Hike
“Drew Magary has produced a remarkable account of his journey, one that is filled with terror, tenderness, beauty, and grace.”—David Grann, bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon
Drew Magary, fan-favorite Defector and former Deadspin columnist, is known for his acerbic takes and his surprisingly nuanced chronicling of his own life. But in The Night the Lights Went Out, he finds himself far out of his depths. On the night of the 2018 Deadspin Awards, he suffered a mysterious fall that caused him to smash his head so hard on a cement floor that he cracked his skull in three places and suffered a catastrophic brain hemorrhage. For two weeks, he remained in a coma. The world was gone to him, and him to it.
In his long recovery from his injury, including understanding what his family and friends went through as he lay there dying, coming to terms with his now permanent disabilities, and trying to find some lesson in this cosmic accident, he leaned on the one sure thing that he knows and that didn't leave him—his writing.
Drew takes a deep dive into what it meant to be a bystander to his own death and figuring out who this new Drew is: a Drew that doesn't walk as well, doesn't taste or smell or see or hear as well, and a Drew that is often failing as a husband and a father as he bounces between grumpiness, irritability, and existential fury. But what's a good comeback story without heartbreak? Eager to get back what he lost, Drew experiences an awakening of a whole other kind in this incredibly funny, medically illuminating, and heartfelt memoir.
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  • From the cover Christmas

    2016


    I needed a watch and a dog, in that order. It was Christmas and I was finally gonna get off my ass and buy a few Statement Gifts. Our three kids—Flora, Rudy, and Colin—had been bitching for a dog for two years. I stoically rebuffed them every time they made the request. I told them, “I’ll think about it,” which is boilerplate Dad-ese for NO. Interchangeable with “We’ll see” as a cheap way to buy time while your kids walk away convinced that they’ve still got a chance at something. If I had said no outright to them, they would have dropped to the ground screaming and gone into exorcism convulsions, the way all kids do when they’re denied something they want. Instead, I strung my kids along on the dog matter, like I was distracting them on a walk through the grocery store candy aisle.

    I didn’t want a dog. In my mind, I had graduated from caring for small things. Our three children were no longer babies. I was done with diapers. I was done with scrubbing Dr. Brown’s formula bottles, breaking each one down into its thirty-seven constituent parts in the sink so I could pick out mildew from each one using a glorified pipe cleaner. Never again. I was free. I walked past newborn babies out in the wild and thought to myself, Oh my God, that baby is so cute! Thank God we’re never ever having one again! In fact, I voluntarily paid a urologist to cut into my scrotum to ensure we wouldn’t. After my vasectomy was over, the nurse discharging me told me, “Congratulations! Your family is complete!” Goddamn right it was, lady. We were finished. There would be five of us and no more.

    That was where I stood. I was finished with small-mammal caregiving. Now these kids wanted us to adopt a fourth, very hairy baby that doesn’t get any smarter and eats dried kangaroo pellets? F*** no, man. That would cut into Daddy’s beer time.

    Of course, the story of any middle-aged dad is the story of a man vainly attempting to stand his ground while it shifts uncontrollably beneath him. The children persisted. They swore they’d take care of the dog. They’d feed it. They’d walk it, even in the rain. They’d housebreak it: a real leap of faith given how many years it took my wife, Sonia, and me to get those three kids to shit in a regulation toilet. I held firm. No, no, no, no, we’re good as is. If you guys need something that’s yippy and shits a lot, Colin is right there.

    Alas, this was not solely my decision to make. Unlike me, Sonia grew up with a dog, and one day during the “Can we have a dog?” onslaught, she turned to me and was like, “You know, a dog could be really good for them.”

    That was it. Once the kids had Sonia in their pocket, it was all over.

    My wife, as you will soon discover, possesses a tenacity that’s far easier to submit to than to push back against. If she has an idea, she WILL see it through. If she asks me to do something and I take too long to get started on it for her liking, she bulls ahead and does it herself. The woman is a goddamn train. She and the kids worked me over as a team until Christmas crept over the horizon and I could see, with growing clarity, a vision of our kids bounding down the stairs Christmas morning and being greeted by a sprightly little doggy named Otis or Kirby or Biscuit or Cerberus wagging his tail and licking their faces.

    I was in on the dog.

    Timing-wise, a dog does not make an ideal Christmas-morning present, especially if you’re intent on adopting one from a shelter and not from a breeder. You...
About the Author-
  • Drew Magary, a co-founder of Defector and a columnist for SF Gate, wrote at Deadspin for over a decade before quitting with the rest of the staff en masse in protest. He's the author of three novels, including Point B, The Hike, and The Postmortal. He lives in Maryland with his wife, his three kids, his dog, and 95 percent of a functioning brain.
     
     
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    July 19, 2021
    Former Deadspin writer Magary (The Hike) delivers a thrilling account of the harrowing near-death experience that changed his life. In December 2018, after hosting the Deadspin Awards in New York City, Magary had an inexplicable fainting spell that fractured the temporal bone in his skull, causing him to need life-saving brain surgery and to be placed in a medically induced coma for two weeks. “The world had gone missing to me,” he writes, “I was not here. But everyone I cared about was.” After three weeks of “learning to live upright again,” he went home to his wife and three kids in Maryland, but, instead of returning to normalcy, Magary discovered he’d lost hearing in one ear, as well as his sense of smell and taste, and spiraled into a depression. Though his story seems ripe for cynicism, he relays it with compassion and humor, as he recounts fighting “bravely against orthopedic sex swings,” and his struggle to “snatch back pieces of old existence.” Magary did regain some of his hearing and his taste, but the real recovery story here is the path he found to accepting his new self, as a man living with disabilities and a newfound “reverence” for “everyday dad moments.” Exquisitely painful, this work brims with hope.

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The Night the Lights Went Out
A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage
Drew Magary
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