Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Wondering Who You Are a quietly wrenching memoir that’s as much about what makes any of us who we are as it is about Lea’s own story."
Dr. Oz
"A beautiful writer…"
Peter Mountford
"An incredibly intimate and honest memoir, Wondering Who You Are shows more vividly than any work of nonfiction I’ve read in years the endlessly complex and delicate nature of identity. In particular, the book movingly reveals how mutable all relationships are, how metamorphosis on one side of a partnership necessitates metamorphosis on the other—we are all constantly changing."
STARRED Booklist (for Audio)
""[A] heartbreakingly honest memoir . . . will touch listeners with its compassion and grace." —Booklist, STARRED"
STARRED review Booklist
"Her stunning account of his recovery efforts and her willful refusal to give up on marriage to the stranger occupying her husband’s body is fantastically heartfelt and inspiring."
People
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In this brave, inspiring memoir she recounts the losses, and what it took to rebuild.
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Seattle Magazine
"With poetic prose and remarkable candor, lea shares the details of helping her husband regain a sense of purpose...and her own difficult transition."
Chris Ryan - Author of Sex at Dawn: How We Mate
"Sonya Lea tells her extraordinary story extraordinarily well. She has a rare ability to bring readers to the places where love and sex intermingle, collide, or go their separate ways. Wondering Who Your Are is an amazing accomplishment. Every page sparkles with wisdom, candor, insight, and love."
Suzanne Morrison
"Sonya Lea’s Wondering Who You Are is an extraordinary story. A wrenching, deeply honest exploration of love and identity that made me question my ideas about memory, about gender, about marriage and family and faith. About the whole human rigmarole. Her story does what the best stories do: it made me think about life in an entirely new way."
Priscilla Long
"An intense and accomplished memoir . . . This sweet, erotic, wrenching story asks quintessential questions about memory, the constructed self, and love—its challenges and deep compensations."
Brian Castner
"This meditation on love and loss left me filled with wonder. Sonya Lea considers every possibility—the full span of understanding, from science to shamans to sex—in an effort to rediscover her husband and, in the process, what makes us uniquely human: our memories of who we are. Words like ‘honest’ and ‘intimate’ don’t even begin to describe this remarkable journey."
Kirkus Reviews
2015-03-02
A wife's tale of loss and recovery. In June 2000, diagnosed with an extremely rare appendix cancer, Lea's husband chose to undergo an experimental surgery to excise cancerous growths filling his abdomen, followed by several days of hot chemotherapy. Post-surgery complications resulted in his suffering an "anoxic insult," loss of oxygen to the brain. After the siege to his body, he emerged weak, disoriented, and unable to remember anything. In her candid, unsentimental debut memoir, Lea tells the story of two survivors—her husband, Richard, and herself—as they have confronted changes in their identity, relationship, and family as a result of his trauma. She interweaves a chronicle of Richard's medical challenges with her account of a 23-year marriage that was often infused with anger: Richard's erupted in violent attacks on their young son, Lea's in rebellion against responsibilities as a wife and mother. Yearning to be wild, she turned to drink, often blacking out, sometimes for minutes; "other times, most of a night would go by and I wouldn't know what had happened." She was an alcoholic for years before she finally went to Alcoholics Anonymous; by the time of Richard's operation, the marriage had improved. As Richard's caregiver, though, anger surfaced again: she admits that she does not like "leaving the role of his lover to take on what feels like becoming his nurse, teacher, and mother." But she is "determined to become the fiercest, most virtuous caregiver anyone has ever seen." Their daughter accused Lea of controlling Richard's story by publishing her version, and sometimes her assertions are troubling: Lea writes, for example, that "Richard isn't experiencing grief for a lost self" because he is "helpless to find that former being." But readers will get little sense of what Richard truly feels, and grief seems a distinct possibility. A forthright memoir that narrates an engrossing journey of self-discovery and fierce devotion.
