Another novelist overcomes stroke to write new book

Recently, I wrote about a Canadian mystery novelist who overcame a devastating stroke to write another novel, by the ingenious device of giving his series character the same disability.

Here, Diane Ackerman reflects on how her husband Paul West coped with his stroke:

Paul had had a massive stroke, one tailored to his own private hell. The author of more than 50 stylishly written books, a master of English prose with the largest working vocabulary I’d ever encountered, a man whose life revolved around words, he had suffered brain damage to the key language areas of his brain and could no longer process language in any form. Global aphasia, it’s called — the curse of a perpetual tip-of-the-tongue memory hunt. He understood little of what people said, and all he could utter was the syllable “mem.” Nothing more. Next...