by Samina Ali
Catapult, 2025. 272 pages. Biography.
At 29, Samina Ali nearly died giving birth to her son. Miraculously, she survived the unchecked eclampsia that had endangered her pregnancy, instead sustaining major brain injury and falling into a coma as she gave birth. When she woke up, only her deepest memories were intact. Her husband was a stranger to her, she didn’t remember having a baby, and any language other than her native Urdu was foreign. Medical consensus was she would never recover. Advised to think of her brain as a shattered puzzle, Ali began the long and difficult journey of piecing herself back learning to walk, speak, and accomplish basic human tasks alongside her newborn. She attempted to reckon with her past identity as a writer and a wife, and her new identity as a mother. Despite her miraculous survival, the disconnect between the old and the new self was devastating. It would be three years before she felt remotely normal, and seven before she was mended and could fully connect with her son. Ali pairs the story of her recovery with the parallel narrative of her relationship to her Islamic upbringing and her fluctuating connection to her faith.
As a single gay man with no children, I'm obviously quite unfamiliar with the process and inherent risks of pregnancy and childbirth. The raw and honest detail with which Ali recounts her journey is eye-opening, and she gives her reader sufficient pauses to not be flash-banged by hit after hit of medical complications. I appreciate how she weaves religious topics into her experiences, and she provides a fascinating peek into Islamic traditions regarding childbirth that I had never encountered before. Through it all, Ali presents herself candidly and vulnerably, letting the reader see an honest register of the hurt and pain she experienced from all sides, including from within. This gently-paced memoir of a remarkably harrowing time has a powerful and lasting impact.