On an ordinary October afternoon in Kampala, Uganda, Tarini Mohan, just twenty-three, leaned into the wind on the back of a motorcycle taxi, laughing into the breeze, her feet anchored and arms spread wide. It was her leap into the unknown—just six weeks earlier, she had left behind the steel-and-glass spires of New York City and a promising career in finance for the vibrant chaos of East Africa. She was living her wild adventure, her faith in herself blooming. Then came the screech of tires, the shatter of glass, and the silence of impact. In an instant, everything unraveled.

Three months disappeared. When Tarini opened her eyes again, she was not in Uganda—but in a hospital bed in India. She had suffered a severe traumatic brain injury. Her memory was fragmented, her once-swift mind now sluggish, her body altered. And in that disoriented, pain-hazed awakening, she encountered the most difficult challenge of her life: beginning again.

Lifequake is the remarkable memoir of what followed—an unflinching, luminous account of recovery, identity, and the quiet, unglamorous work of rebuilding a life after it has come undone. With emotional precision and literary poise, Mohan traces the slow arc of her healing: not a miraculous comeback, but a process filled with grief, doubt, resistance, and grace.

This is not a story about returning to who she was. It is about discovering who she is now—and how healing, in its truest sense, is not a restoration but a re-creation. She draws strength from unlikely sources, including the memoirs of Trisha Meili, known as the Central Park Jogger, and Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms. Their narratives of trauma and recovery—like Mohan’s own—underscore a shared truth: that healing is not linear, and wholeness is not the same as what once was.

As Mohan attempts to understand her new self—through patchy recollections, interviews with friends and family, and instinctive writing—Lifequake becomes a meditation on memory, vulnerability, and the nature of personal continuity. Who are we, she asks, when the core elements of our cognition—our words, our pace, our clarity—are compromised? Where does identity live when memory falters? How do we claim dignity in the face of condescension, or independence in a body that has forgotten its own instincts?

Set between India and the United States, Lifequake is also a cultural study of how disability is understood, witnessed, and too often ignored. In the intimate care of her Delhi “village”—family, friends, doctors, and caregivers—Mohan experienced tenderness, fierce protection, and love. But beyond this safe perimeter, she encountered a world ill-equipped to see her clearly: a world where empathy was often confused with pity, where medical systems buckled, and where silence met vulnerability.

And yet, Lifequake is suffused with life—its absurdities, its stillness, its wonder. Mohan writes with a clarity that is never cold, and a lyricism that never strays into sentimentality. In capturing both the interiority of illness and the rich texture of recovery, she offers a memoir that is at once deeply personal and broadly resonant. Her story invites us not to look away from brokenness, but to consider that it might carry its own forms of wisdom.

In the tradition of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Tarini Mohan’s Lifequake is a powerful and affecting portrait of survival, adaptation, and the long, difficult work of becoming whole in a new way. It is a book about what it means to live—not despite our limitations, but through them. And it is a testament to the quiet, radical courage it takes to tell one’s story at all.