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The Night the Lights Went Out: A Memoir of Life After Brain Damage Hardcover – October 12, 2021

by Drew Magary (Author)

4.6 619 ratings

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A fascinating, darkly funny comeback story of learning to live with a broken mind after a near-fatal traumatic brain injury—from the acclaimed author of The Hike

“Drew Magary has produced a remarkable account of his journey, one that is filled with terror, tenderness, beauty, and grace.”—David Grann, bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon

Drew Magary, fan-favorite Defector and former Deadspin columnist, is known for his acerbic takes and his surprisingly nuanced chronicling of his own life. But in The Night the Lights Went Out, he finds himself far out of his depths. On the night of the 2018 Deadspin Awards, he suffered a mysterious fall that caused him to smash his head so hard on a cement floor that he cracked his skull in three places and suffered a catastrophic brain hemorrhage. For two weeks, he remained in a coma. The world was gone to him, and him to it.

In his long recovery from his injury, including understanding what his family and friends went through as he lay there dying, coming to terms with his now permanent disabilities, and trying to find some lesson in this cosmic accident, he leaned on the one sure thing that he knows and that didn't leave him—his writing.

Drew takes a deep dive into what it meant to be a bystander to his own death and figuring out who this new Drew is: a Drew that doesn't walk as well, doesn't taste or smell or see or hear as well, and a Drew that is often failing as a husband and a father as he bounces between grumpiness, irritability, and existential fury. But what's a good comeback story without heartbreak? Eager to get back what he lost, Drew experiences an awakening of a whole other kind in this incredibly funny, medically illuminating, and heartfelt memoir.

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Popular Highlights in this book

What are popular highlights?

To live on, you have to make the good happen. A different life need not be a worse one. You have to decide if you’re the lucky one or not. Why live on otherwise?
Highlighted by 85 Kindle readers
Self-awareness is you saying to other people, “Tell me my flaws are pretty.”
Highlighted by 84 Kindle readers
Again, life is destined to be incomplete. The sooner you accept that, the more you’ll enjoy your little parcel of space-time.
Highlighted by 84 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

“It’s a hell of a thing to wake up inside a mind you don’t know...” –Drew Magary

Editorial Reviews

Review

“It’s harrowing reading, but there are moments of hope and joy, particularly as he navigates fatherhood.”—The New York Times

“Riveting . . . This is a deeply felt, and often very funny, good book.”—Linda Holmes, NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour

“Enjoyable reading for anyone who likes their recovery and life insights served with a side of wry humor and plenty of sarcasm.”—New York Post

“From heartrending to hilarious, The Night the Lights Went Out is a deeply inspirational story of love, family, friendships, and the resiliency of the human spirit that will keep you riveted (and laughing) to the very last page.”—Gilbert King, author of the Pulitzer prize–winning Devil in the Grove

“A visceral, transporting tale of life, death, and the liminal space between. And an enlightening, emotional evaluation of exactly what makes us who we are. This book is a necessary window into the aftermath of trauma and a reminder to never take our senses for granted.”—Kelsey McKinney, author of God Spare the Girls

“Drew Magary has written about the darkest year of his life with honesty, insight, and the perfect amount of humor to remind us that he’s one of the funniest writers around—even (or especially) when he’s literally writing about life and death.”—Reeves Wiedeman, author of Billion Dollar Loser

“Drew Magary’s The Night the Lights Went Out is funny, because of course it is. But I was most struck by how searching and hopeful it is; a sincere exploration of the mysteries of the mind and body and what it means to lose part of yourself but not always be entirely certain of which part. The book is soulful, searing, and deeply human.”—Will Leitch, author of How Lucky

About the Author

Drew Magary, a co-founder of Defector and a columnist for SF Gate, wrote at Deadspin for over a decade before quitting with the rest of the staff en masse in protest. He's the author of three novels, including Point B, The Hike, and The Postmortal. He lives in Maryland with his wife, his three kids, his dog, and 95 percent of a functioning brain.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Christmas

2016

I needed a watch and a dog, in that order. It was Christmas and I was finally gonna get off my ass and buy a few Statement Gifts. Our three kids—Flora, Rudy, and Colin—had been bitching for a dog for two years. I stoically rebuffed them every time they made the request. I told them, “I’ll think about it,” which is boilerplate Dad-ese for NO. Interchangeable with “We’ll see” as a cheap way to buy time while your kids walk away convinced that they’ve still got a chance at something. If I had said no outright to them, they would have dropped to the ground screaming and gone into exorcism convulsions, the way all kids do when they’re denied something they want. Instead, I strung my kids along on the dog matter, like I was distracting them on a walk through the grocery store candy aisle.

I didn’t want a dog. In my mind, I had graduated from caring for small things. Our three children were no longer babies. I was done with diapers. I was done with scrubbing Dr. Brown’s formula bottles, breaking each one down into its thirty-seven constituent parts in the sink so I could pick out mildew from each one using a glorified pipe cleaner. Never again. I was free. I walked past newborn babies out in the wild and thought to myself, Oh my God, that baby is so cute! Thank God we’re never ever having one again! In fact, I voluntarily paid a urologist to cut into my scrotum to ensure we wouldn’t. After my vasectomy was over, the nurse discharging me told me, “Congratulations! Your family is complete!” Goddamn right it was, lady. We were finished. There would be five of us and no more.

That was where I stood. I was finished with small-mammal caregiving. Now these kids wanted us to adopt a fourth, very hairy baby that doesn’t get any smarter and eats dried kangaroo pellets? F*** no, man. That would cut into Daddy’s beer time.

Of course, the story of any middle-aged dad is the story of a man vainly attempting to stand his ground while it shifts uncontrollably beneath him. The children persisted. They swore they’d take care of the dog. They’d feed it. They’d walk it, even in the rain. They’d housebreak it: a real leap of faith given how many years it took my wife, Sonia, and me to get those three kids to shit in a regulation toilet. I held firm. No, no, no, no, we’re good as is. If you guys need something that’s yippy and shits a lot, Colin is right there.

Alas, this was not solely my decision to make. Unlike me, Sonia grew up with a dog, and one day during the “Can we have a dog?” onslaught, she turned to me and was like, “You know, a dog could be really good for them.”

That was it. Once the kids had Sonia in their pocket, it was all over.

My wife, as you will soon discover, possesses a tenacity that’s far easier to submit to than to push back against. If she has an idea, she WILL see it through. If she asks me to do something and I take too long to get started on it for her liking, she bulls ahead and does it herself. The woman is a goddamn train. She and the kids worked me over as a team until Christmas crept over the horizon and I could see, with growing clarity, a vision of our kids bounding down the stairs Christmas morning and being greeted by a sprightly little doggy named Otis or Kirby or Biscuit or Cerberus wagging his tail and licking their faces.

I was in on the dog.

Timing-wise, a dog does not make an ideal Christmas-morning present, especially if you’re intent on adopting one from a shelter and not from a breeder. You can’t wrap it. You can’t hide it in the basement for a month. If you bring a dog home late on Christmas Eve and stick it by the tree, it’s not just gonna hang out there with a cup of hot cider and chill until the sun rises. Instead, this Christmas Eve, Santa wrote a letter to the kids consecrating the Future Acquisition of Dog. Sonia and I placed the letter on the living room coffee table—jumping near it not allowed—next to St. Nick’s usual plate of unfinished, stale cookies. That was their statement present: Dad going from “I’ll think about it” to “I have finally thought about it.”

Meantime, I needed a watch. Sonia and I had been married for fourteen years and had settled into a place where we rarely, if ever, bothered to buy each other gifts for any occasion. Not for Christmas. Not for birthdays. Definitely not for Valentine’s Day. There were a lot of reasons for this, chief among them the fact that we were cheap and lazy. We knew that we had to save every dollar we earned during the kids’ upbringing so that, once they turned college age, the nefarious debt-lords at BIG UNIVERSITY could extinguish our life savings in half a second. I worked as a sports blogger for Deadspin at the time: a dream job in many ways, but not necessarily in salary. I made good money, but not tens of millions of dollars. So there was no dough available to fritter away on a countertop bread maker or some other perfunctory Christmas gift that adults get tired of more quickly than children do of their gifts.

Besides, we both preferred homemade gifts from the kids: handprints, notes, pictures of Transformers that Colin made me print out so he could color them in, sloppy collages, etc. Gifts like these are living artifacts of your kid’s personality, and of that exact moment in their life, in a way that nothing from a store can be. I would not be able to remember what Flora was like at age five without her works from that era. I papered the walls of my home office with all of these gifts, to remind myself who I really worked for. Years later, I would remove that artwork and replace it with a single framed, collective art project of theirs that means more to me than anything else I own.

The downside of all that syrupy perspective was that it rendered both Sonia and me stereotypical “Oh, I don’t need anything” parents who are annoyingly difficult to shop for. For her part, Sonia enjoyed returning things much more than she enjoyed buying them. So it felt wasteful to buy each other gifts that would prove either useless or burdensome. Instead, we just bought shit for ourselves as needed. One time I bought myself a smoker that retroactively became my Father’s Day gift two months later. I smoked enough ribs to make your heart choke.

You can call this routine a rut, but it was an awfully comfortable one. Sonia and I were confident in our routine. We knew each other well enough to know what we needed and when we needed it. There was no need (or cash) for me to go all out and show up with a f***ing Lexus in the driveway on Christmas morning, a haughty yuppie bow glued to the top of it. I only needed to get Sonia a big Christmas present if the stars aligned and there was something cool she needed right when the holidays came around.

Luckily for me, her watch had become a piece of shit.

Through the early years of our marriage, Sonia relied on a Swiss Army watch her parents had given her for her high school graduation. This watch sucked its battery dry with gluttonous efficiency. She got the battery swapped out every four months, trudging down to a local watch store that fulfilled every idea you have in your mind about what a local watch store looks like. You walk in the door and you’re greeted by the sight of a thousand old clocks and other assorted curios, all gathering dust. The proprietor, a very nice man, owns a parrot that hangs out on the counter, its talons long enough to dig a trench across your brain. This is the kind of watch store that may or may not have a portal to a witch’s cottage in the back. An old lady is always waiting in front of you in line, and she’s never there for a routine watch job. No, no, she came because she needs the pallet bridge inside an antique pocket watch removed, soaked in gold leaf, buffed to a high gloss, lacquered in TruCoat, and then reinstalled inside a different watch she got for eight bucks at the estate sale of a dead neighbor.

Sonia would get her battery replaced, wear it home, pray it stayed alive, and then cry out, “IT’S BROKEN AGAIN!” months later. But she loved the watch, so much so that she bought me my own Swiss Army watch back in 2000. It was a splurge for her, given what we were making at the time. She told me after the fact, “I bought that watch because I was like, This guy is the one. At least, he better be.”

I was. We got married in 2002, with matching watches to boot. When you’re married, you gotta be real careful about matching. If you dress exactly the same, you look like the stars of a f***ing nursery rhyme. Matching watches were a touch more discreet. People might notice we were wearing the same watch, but we weren’t clad in identical gingham bonnets or anything. We were a tastefully, harmoniously accessorized couple.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harmony (October 12, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593232712
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593232712
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 0.04 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.34 x 0.98 x 9.4 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #379,195 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #350 in Biographies of People with Disabilities (Books)
- #395 in Nervous System Diseases (Books)
- #11,849 in Memoirs (Books)

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4.6 619 ratings

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Drew Magary

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Drew Magary is the co-founder of Defector and an in-house columnist for Medium's GEN magazine. He’s also the author of five books: Point B, The Hike, The Postmortal, Someone Could Get Hurt, and Men With Balls. He lives in Maryland with his wife and three children, and enjoys taking long walks. Oh, and he's a Chopped champion. BELIEVE IT.

Find Drew on Twitter @drewmagary

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K. Niemla

I bought & loved this book knowing nothing about Drew Magary

Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2021

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I had no clue about the author before reading this book. This Magary fellow seems to have fans who support him online, but I wasn't one of them. So this review is coming from someone who was pulled in by the book itself, with no previous knowledge of Drew Magary lore. The book stands alone without it, and is free of pro sports talk, thank goodness.

It's a story about sustaining and recovering from a brain injury. There's other books like that, but this one feels honest and real. There's no filler in this book, even when it seems like filler, since it is a book about the preciousness of ordinary life. Asides with memories and other details are the bread that makes the body of the story, not the filling. There are references to Covid-19 which will date it later, but it helps frame our current mindset; hopefully it'll be just a memory for us all in ten years.

Magary's voice is colloquial but complex, moving at a brisk pace without missing the details. His honesty about his shortcomings is endearing, even when he doesn't mince words about how difficult he can be. His style keeps things from ever becoming too saccharine, even though it is a very sweet sentimental book. Magary is the sort of modern evolved male who is unafraid to overtly value love and family.

His choice to use a script format for the time he spent out of consciousness might seem lazy at first, but it's brilliant. Experiencing their horror and love is more valuable than an interpretation. The narrative becomes a meta-narrative as Magary discovers things he didn't know by listening to them, hearing them alongside us. His loved ones become characters in the story speaking in their own voices, not Magary's, as is their right.

I really don't know what attracted me to this book. Maybe the cover? My interest in stories of transformation and struggle? Either way I'm so glad I bought this book. On top of enjoying it, I'm also becoming one of those Drew Magary fans. It's gift that keeps on giving.

14 people found this helpful

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Sandy W

Informative and entertaining

Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2022

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of this book, in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. Yes, it had a lot of medical details and was not exactly a cheery subject! But I found the details riveting, and the author's style made it a very good read.

This tells what happened in the aftermath of the author's sudden collapse, with fairly ghastly resulting brain damage, apparently from hitting the concrete walls/floor in just the worst ways. Unless I missed it, it appears that nobody quite knows what actually caused the collapse - and while there are speculations and possibilities mentioned, the real story here is coming back - how did Magary manage to get a life back after the injury. Initially, it seemed questionable whether he would even survive, much less make a reasonable recovery.

His account appears to be an honest one, without glossing over how hard it was for his wife and kids. Coping with his various resulting disabilities was doubtless hard enough, but his anger was probably even worse. While anger at his circumstances was certainly a normal reaction to all this, it seems to have been frequently misdirected. Fortunately, he did decide that this was not something that could continue, but he honestly describes the difficult path forward.

One thing that seems to have bothered some reviewers was that much of the story, especially the earlier parts of the story, was told by other people who were there the night of the injury and during his hospital stay. To me, this added to the book - after all, they were describing events that the author could not describe firsthand. I thought these accounts added greatly to the story.

I learned a bit about brain function, brain damage, hearing loss, and so on - a lot of "wow, I didn't know that!" I'm certainly no expert now, but I think I have a bit more understanding of the science involved, in a layperson's way. And, the book was certainly enjoyable to read - the author has an easy, amusing style.

All in all, a book that's well worth reading!

Helpful

Kindle Customer

Touching, entertaining, and inspiring

Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2022

Verified Purchase

As a fellow TBI survivor, I was fascinated to hear from one of my favorite authors about how his experience and mine were similar, and consider all the ways they were different (mine was less severe, but I also was uninsured and received much less care).

This book is a a very earnest effort from a writer who made a name for himself with his sense of humor, but i still found myself smiling and laughing enough to take some of the trauma and terror out of such a deathly serious topic.

Having been a faithful reader of Mr. Magary for almost a decade, I could not be happier for him and his recovery, and his success at Defector.com. I'm looking forward to reading his articles and books for many years to come.

3 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Exactly as described.

Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2024

Verified Purchase

No problems - arrived in a timely manner.

Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2021

Verified Purchase

I read the original Deadspin column Drew wrote about the night he almost died and it was riveting. I’ve had it bookmarked ever since and have reread it several times…it remains a remarkable, compelling gut-punch.

For me, as a result, this book is something of a sequel. That column was what happened then…this is more about what has happened since. It’s a great book and having plowed through it in a single day, I plan to reread it tomorrow to catch more nuance. It’s Drew…the nuance and insight are always there, no matter how much he likes to pretend he can bury it in fart jokes!

Very, very well done, Drew, and I’m so very glad you’re still out there writing and “unfazed.” :)

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