From Cinelle Barnes, author of Monsoon Mansion, comes a hopeful and heart-wrenching memoir about remembering and rebuilding a life after everything she knows disappears in a flash.

In 2023, Cinelle Barnes is writing a travelogue about journeying home to the Philippines after a twenty-year separation when she suffers a traumatic brain injury. Cinelle’s story of her adoption and immigration to America as a child is not an easy one to tell to begin with. Suddenly, it seems impossible. Her memories and her connection to her husband and daughter in the Carolinas, to her own sense of self, and to her past are all erased in the blink of an eye. Cinelle has to not only piece together who she used to be but struggle to learn who she is here and now.

In this memoir of resilience and recovery, Cinelle charts her way back to life. Through her unfinished manuscript, she sees a creative and vibrant former self she longs to remember and to know all over again. With the everlasting support of family and friends, Cinelle discovers that nobody heals or journeys home alone.

Cinelle Barnes is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir and Malaya: Essays on Freedom. She is also the editor of A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South. Cinelle is a brain aneurysm survivor and sits on the South Carolina Brain Injury Leadership Council. She lives in Charleston with her husband, daughter, and cat. For information, visit www.cinellebarnes.com.