Kimberly Warner’s Unfixed is a wonder. Beyond a mesmerizing story, it’s a master class in lyric memoir. While the language is poetic—lilting, transfixing—the syntax is wild. It whips up a tempest that’s unsettling and destabilizing—the perfect match of form to content for this extraordinary memoir.
Within months of each other, two traumatic events befell Warner. Each in its own way ruptured her identity. Together they cleft her life into a stable, orderly before and an upside down, underwater after in which nothing was certain and there was no solid ground under her feet.
In the spring of 2014, she was riding her bicycle when a driver opened the car door as she was approaching. She tumbled over her handlebars and fractured her pelvis. While she was recovering from her injuries, she learned that the man she believed to be her father—a man whose death in a 1993 car accident she was still grieving—was not her biological father. In the ensuing years, she was beset by mysterious, debilitating symptoms that plunged her into unimaginable chaos. Doctor after doctor and treatment after treatment brought no relief. The more she grasped at control, the more it slipped away from her. She was living her life in the upside down.
Unfixed explores Warner’s braided attempts to regain her physical equilibrium and unravel the story of her origins. It traces her hard won understanding that neither of these tasks was entirely achievable—that some things can’t be repaired or restored and that grace comes in surrendering, in acceptance of imperfection and uncertainty. She learns “to live inside the not-knowing,” with “discomfort becoming my new uncomfortable.”
“Our biology,” she writes, “does everything in its power to fix us. But when it fails, the unfixed adapt. The unfixed tell their stories.” To help stitch her identity back together, Warner leaned in to storytelling and a bit of magical realism, going back in time and writing letters at pivotal points in her life to the biological father she never knew, breathing him into being and forging a relationship in the only way she could.
Unfixed is intelligent, visceral, and startlingly original. It will pull you in like an undertow and immerse you so deeply into Warner’s experience you’ll feel you’ve stepped out of your own mind and body and into hers.
—BKJ
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