She survived a devastating brain injury because she had already survived something harder.

Amy Stacey Curtis was a practicing installation artist widely recognized and awarded for an 18-year project presented throughout nine abandoned Maine mills. Soon after completing this ambitious opus, her brain was attacked. For 22 months, Amy would see horrific nonstop images of her suicide, this unrelenting psychosis soon accompanied by a debilitating head-to-toe loss of muscle control. Amy’s arms and legs flailed, her hands and wrists curled, her head and neck swayed, and her cheeks and mouth twisted, requiring the use of a wheelchair, severely impacting her speech, and cutting her off from her community. After two psychiatric wards, eight antipsychotic drugs, and 15 months of misdiagnosing doctors, it was finally determined that Amy’s brain was injured by past Lyme disease she never knew she had.

Amy’s brain knew just what to do to protect her, to survive the unthinkable, and to heal what was broken—twice. Alternating between past and present—one saga that begins when Amy is seven as her father threatens to kill her, her three younger brothers, and himself, the other when Amy is 46 as a virus becomes determined to kill her by her own hand—this dual-timeline against-all-odds memoir chronicles Amy’s battles and triumphs over suicide, relentless childhood trauma, and life-altering disability, with self-advocacy, perseverance, will, and a little humor.