Asian American Literature Fans

I’ve definitely been on a memoir kick lately; seems to be the first thing I pick up these days. Next up on the list was Christine Hyung-Oak Lee’s Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember: The Stroke That Changed My Life (Ecco, 2017). I actually recall this author because I saw that she would be publishing a novel (tentatively called Golem of Seoul and due out sometime in 2018). In any case, I was surprised to see this listing first, but was intrigued by the provocative title. As the official page sets this one up for us: “Christine Hyung-Oak Lee woke up with a headache on New Year’s Eve 2006. By that afternoon, she saw the world—quite literally—upside down. By New Year’s Day, she was unable to form a coherent sentence. And after hours in the ER, days in the hospital, and multiple questions and tests, she learned that she had had a stroke. For months, Lee outsourced her memories to her notebook. It is from these memories that she has constructed this frank and compelling memoir. In a precise and captivating narrative, Lee navigates fearlessly between chronologies, weaving her childhood humiliations and joys together with the story of the early days of her marriage; and then later, in painstaking, painful, and unflinching detail, her stroke and every upset, temporary or permanent, that it causes. Lee processes her stroke and illuminates the connection between memory and identity in an honest, meditative, and truly funny manner, utterly devoid of self-pity. And as she recovers, she begins to realize that this unexpected and devastating event provides a catalyst for coming to terms with her true self.”

Stylistically, what’s interesting about this memoir is that it’s fairly repetitive and pretty much non-linear. This approach was perhaps necessitated by Lee’s condition; it’s evident that she employs notes and other such writings that she penned during her recovery to help generate what would eventually become this memoir. Despite this type of style, the memoir is eminently readable. Perhaps, one of the most tragic things about this memoir is how much the author has to redefine herself in light of the stroke. Because of an underlying medical condition associated with this stroke, the author battled fatigue related to cardiovascular activities all of her life. It was only when the stroke made clear that why this problem occurred (amongst other medical issues) that the author begins to understand that things she thought were all in her head were actually physiologically related. What’s further apparent is that the desire to forge ahead despite these medical issues (leading up to the apocalyptic stroke) created a hardened persona, one that would be categorically undone by the simple fact that the author could not create short term memories following the stroke. In some sense, this inability to remember becomes a way for the author also to have a kind of renaissance, to remake her identity in light of the new information and during her incredible recovery process.

Along the way, readers are treated to the navel-gazing necessary for the best in this genre; particularly crucial is the elliptical, yet nuanced way that the author delves into her marriage, which is slowly crumbling apart. There’s always an intriguing meta-discursive level to this work, as the author makes clear that the very writing of the memoir would have been impossible had she not been able to recover her short term memory capabilities. Indeed, as she explicitly tells us, short term memories allow us to retain what it is we wrote earlier on in a sentence so that we can make sense of the what need to write at the end. Thus, to write this memoir, to become the writer she needs to be, the author achieves more than a publication, she models her amazing, but difficult recovery process. Certainly, a wonderful work to be paired alongside other medical memoirs, such as Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air.

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu