Deadspin and Defector writer Drew Magary offers a funny, thrilling and surprisingly tender story of his life-altering brain damage in The Night the Lights Went Out. In December 2018, Magary was enjoying a night out with his co-workers after the annual Deadspin Awards when a mysterious fall caused him to smack his head on a concrete floor at a karaoke bar. Following intensive brain surgery and a two-week coma--which everyone doubted he would survive--he woke up, but not as the same man he'd been before. The Night the Lights Went Out spans the time of his coma and the year following, as Magary struggles with his new disabilities and mood swings, and comes to terms with the person he has become.
As in his columns, Magary's prose brims with humor and irreverent observations. Nevertheless, unlike in his columns, the writing in his memoir often has a compassionate center, reaching for hopeful heights even in the midst of unimaginable tragedy. Magary's reflections on his turbulent recovery are both fascinating and stirring, but it is the memoir's first half--which tells the story of the accident and ensuing coma, through the oral histories of his family, friends and co-workers--that truly shines. The snippets from these witnesses are as devastating as they are full of love, as heartbreaking as they are inspiring. Through these intimate remembrances, the relationships and people who define Magary's existence come to life, and readers get to experience the therapeutic nature that both hearing and compiling these remembrances must have been for the writer himself. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor