HEAD CASE
By Cole Cohen. (Henry Holt, 221 pages, $25.)
Cole Cohen was always bright, but she was also always a little off. She got lost easily, grew agitated in crowds, was late for everything, all the time. She couldn't read a map, never remembered which was left and which was right and, for a while, wrote her words backward. Yet she was brilliant in other ways, especially verbally, "in special education and the gifted program simultaneously," she says.
She was tested, over and over, for learning disabilities. She was drugged: Seroquel, lamictal, rozerem, ativan.
And then, in her 20s, on her way to grad school, someone thought to do a brain scan. And whoa — they found a hole. In her brain. A hole the size of a lemon.
"Head Case" is Cohen's nonfiction account of living with this abnormality before and after the MRI that discovered it. The book is sad and funny, chipper and melancholy, thought-provoking and gasp-inducing. Cohen's hole is in the parietal lobe, which affects perception, touch and navigation as well as the ability to understand numbers. But of course there is no cure.
Once her condition is diagnosed, Cohen faces a raft of frustrating problems trying to get help, trying to get disability aid, trying to get — at the suggestion of her doctor — a guide dog to help her navigate city streets. (Not being blind, she does not qualify, although in a surreal scene — one of many — she is offered a cane.)
Throughout, she wrestles with her future (she has been fired from countless jobs for not being able to count money and for never coming in on time); she falls in love and struggles with intimacy; she pushes to live an independent life; she tries to figure out where she belongs in this world. All the normal problems of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, made more difficult by the presence of a lemon-sized hole.
Laurie Hertzel,
Senior editor/books
