A spellbinding memoir of a mother's fight to save her daughter from a mysterious brain illness, for readers of Susannah Cahalan's Brain on Fire and David Sheff's Beautiful Boy.
It began with a seizure on a Brooklyn sidewalk just as fourteen-year-old Victoria was preparing to enter one of the most competitive high schools in the country. Her immune system had gone haywire, targeting critical neural receptors. Eventually, the once happy, high-achieving teenager could no longer read, write, or speak, and was often trapped in a world of delusions, her behavior increasingly erratic and dangerous.
Victoria was diagnosed with a catastrophic autoimmune condition—a blow that would challenge everything her mother, award-winning journalist Jeannine Amber, thought she knew about motherhood, love and resilience. Desperate for answers, Amber plunged into the medical literature and unearthed a shocking connection between her daughter's condition, historical accounts of "demonic possession," and a medical mystery that went unsolved for nearly a century.
Telling her story with unflinching honesty, humor, and fiery prose, Amber confronts the most daunting challenge of her life — how to save her child from disappearing —in an astonishing tale of scientific intrigue, hard-fought recovery, and the remarkable power of a mother's love.