“Alan's head got run over by a speedboat,” as writer Cathy Crimmins summarizes it in the introduction to her book, Where Is the Mango Princess? (Alfred A. Knopf; $24), and that single freak accident changed the lives of one family forever.

        At their 7-year-old daughter's school auction, Ms. Crimmins and her husband, Alan, won a week's vacation on a Canadian lake. After a boat driven by teen-agers collided with the tiny skiff carrying Alan, their daughter, Kelly, and some other friends across the lake, it wasn't clear immediately whether he would survive.

Five days in a coma

        In her richly honest and human work, Ms. Crimmins recounts the details from the emergency helicopter ride to the nearest Canadian hospital through months of remarkable physical recovery.

        Alan Forman, an attorney who had sophisticated tastes in music, art and theater, spent the first five days after the accident in a coma. He then spent months in rehabilitation, learning to walk and execute such simple tasks as knotting a necktie. After five years, Alan is one of the miracles — a high-functioning example of TBI — working part-time, driving his daughter to and from soccer games, and, if he gets a nap beforehand, able to interact appropriately enough at social gatherings.

        But the brain is everything, Mrs. Crimmins makes the casual reader understand, and even the brain injury that leaves no visible signs leaves a mark that is indelible on the souls affected by it.

        “TBI is like an incomplete death: you've lost a person, or parts of that person, but he's still here,” Ms. Crimmins writes. Through the months and years of recovery, we feel with the author the joy when her husband can walk again and the frustration at his frequent outbursts of anger and irrational irritation.

        From his earliest moments of recognition out of the coma — when he believes there are two Cathys (one in the hospital room with him and one at home to receive his phone calls), to his return to work part-time as a trust attorney, we come to know the characters Ms. Crimmins refers to simply as the Old Alan and the New Alan. Learning to walk again seems simple somehow when compared with the traces of personality that might be gone forever.

        The book could have been a laundry list of facts: people with TBI have difficulty with impulse control, prioritizing tasks, picking up social cues and exercising judgment. It is that, but so much more. At times, her brilliant husband seems more like a peer for their daughter than another adult.

        At other times, he seems like his former self — interpreting legal documents, understanding a complex theater performance, appreciating the discovery of a conch shell at the beach. All old traits are magnified with brain injury, she explains, so that a man who once loved Indian food is now obsessed with it, and a man who prized cleanliness goes on laundry binges — ruining dry-clean-only garments by throwing them in the washer.

        Her choice as a writer not to sanitize or censor the truth makes the book a riveting read. We cringe with her at Alan's outbursts of anger or profanity, his obsession with masturbation while still in recovery, and his blurting of inappropriate remarks when he appears to be completely “back to normal.”

        We can smile with some understanding when she admits to wanting to beat him senseless with the cell phone when he has lost reality one time too many, and cheer for herwhen she decides to let their daughter have a puppy for her eighth birthday, even though her brain-injured husband is not ready to handle one more bit of responsibility.

        Where Is the Mango Princess? is a book that TBI caregivers and professionals will welcome and embrace. Beyond that, it is an engaging family tale that anyone who values the human brain and the magical way in which it makes each of our personalities unique should read.

        E-mail dkkendrick@earthlink.net. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/kendrick

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