Wake Me When It's Over

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Crystalline, impassioned and astutely self-knowing, Blakely's memoir recalls the events surrounding her nine-day coma in March 1984 at the age of 36. Although she was suffering simultaneously from diabetes and a severe pulmonary infection, she convincingly argues that her coma was triggered by undue stress--guilt and grief over an impending divorce; the suicide of a beloved, schizophrenic brother; the travails of meeting editorial deadlines and financial needs as a freelance journalist; and her brutal commute between a lover and career based in New York City and two young sons in Ann Arbor, Mich. While comatose, the author says, "sounds and voices I identified as real actions, real people, would suddenly melt into the bizarre plots and characters of surreal dreams." Although her recapping of popular movies and J. D. Salinger's fiction proves pedestrian, on the whole Blakely inspires, with a flood of rich musings on her embrace of feminism and disaffection with Catholicism; the transience of sanity; the ethics of the writerly craft; the indignities and loneliness of illness; and the ever-emphatic love of the Blakely clan. First serial to Redbook; author tour.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In 1984, Blakely spent nine days in the Intensive Care Unit at New York City's St. Vincent's Hospital in a diabetic coma. These nine days were--apparently--spent reviewing key moments and relationships in her life: her childhood and adolescence in a large and loving family; love for a manic-depressive brother, who eventually committed suicide; marriage, childbirth, and "creative" divorce; growing feminism; work as a freelance writer; move to New York; and relationship with a strong, supportive man. "It was a passionate psychological journey, uncovering old, unextinguished yearnings. When I awakened, I gradually discovered that the life planned by the woman I had been no longer fit the woman I'd become." (All comas should be so productive!) Whether Blakely actually had these insights during the coma itself or during reflection in the months that followed, many contemporary women will identify with her struggles and applaud her physical and emotional courage.
- Marcia G. Fuchs, Guilford Free Lib., Ct.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.