Trying Unfathomably Hard to Live

While biking to work one summer morning, Alyssa Favreau gets in an accident, has a stroke, and suffers severe brain damage. After losing consciousness, she spends the next month floating between wakefulness and surreal dreams.

As she emerges back into the world, she must relearn how to move, think, feel, and live in a changed body and mind. In this memoir, Alyssa chronicles the frustrating, absurd, uncanny process of re-entering her life as someone not quite the same as before.

"It's hard to write about healing without feeling the weight of the ableist world breathing down your neck, wanting you to write a hero's recovery journey, a brush with death that is singularly your own, and will end in a return to pre-accident "normal". Alyssa Favreau's Trying Unfathomably Hard to Live pushes against this mainstream desire and delves into the difficulties of healing and recovering, and the way our ableist world affects how we let ourselves heal. With the company of books like Eli Clare's Brilliant Imperfection, Barbara Ehrenreich's Natural Causes, and Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, Favreau articulates how we might find new ways of living after injury with humour, curiosity, and care. Not shying away from showing her impatience or the emotional devastation of healing, Favreau wonders how to lean deeper into the feeling of being alive, trying to not rush her recovery, trying to find new ways to live. She says, "I have learned one set of rules just to see them change completely, without the imperceptible shift of aging. I'm in constant negotiation with myself". This renegotiation, while exhausting, also offers a new, more compassionate, way of living." 

- Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, author of Knot Body and The Good Arabs, winner of the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal 2022

"What do you do when everything changes in an instant? Trying Unfathomably Hard to Live is a powerful memoir of a double near-miss - an experience that Favreau could have walked away from unharmed, or that could have killed her, but ultimately leaves her in an excruciating no-man's land: the fog of recovery. As she rehabs from her stroke, she has the agonizing job of parsing every little detail of the accident, as well as the experience of being out of time and place, restarting from scratch, and the tragedy of a year of normalcy lost to the arduous process of healing. It's a book that will resonate with anyone who's experienced the agony of a disabling event, bolstered by the author's unrelenting honesty, vulnerability, and a fascinating headfirst dive into the literature surrounding disability."

- Alex Manley, author of Post-Man: Essays on Being a Neurodivergent Non-Binary Person