Sex with a Brain Injury

In the devastating-yet-hilarious memoir Sex With A Brain Injury, D/Annie Liontas suffers three traumatic brain injuries within the span of a year, and finds themself adrift in their work, their identity, and their marriage. This is a book grappling with spectacle. There are spectacular brain injuries: D/Annie’s was not. There are spectacular recovery stories: D/Annie’s dragged on far past the expectations of their doctors and loved ones—and in fact, these very expectations are steeped in misconceptions and exaggerations. This is, of course, because there is no singular understanding of a “disabled experience,” and to Liontas themself, their life became an exhausting swamp of contradictions. Uncontainable rage at anybody in particular, yet frightening vulnerability to any ordinary object resting above eye level. A strained marriage, despite being the partner friends mock for being impossibly lovey-dovey in the past. D/Annie intellectualizes the nuances of pain, damage, and trauma, but also returns again and again to the simple language of a real world steeped in suicide, drug abuse, and violence against queer communities. A world, too, where Liontas’s brain injuries became a catalyst to empathize with their estranged biological mother. Sex With A Brain Injury is partly a research project covering decades of medical history and partly an ode to pop culture and literature, but it’s also a vulnerable and humor-filled journey striving towards a secure existence.