The Unmapped Mind

A Memoir of Neurology, Incurable Disease and Learning How to Live

By: Christian Donlan

Narrated by: Daniel Weyman

Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

Penguin Audio presents The Unmapped Mind by Christian Donlan, read by Daniel Weyman.

"My daughter took her first steps on the day I was diagnosed - a juxtaposition so perfect, so trite, so filled with the tacky artifice of real life that I am generally too embarrassed to tell anybody about it." 

Shortly after his daughter, Leontine, was born, Christian Donlan's world shifted an inch to the left. He started to miss light switches and door handles when reaching for them. He would injure himself in a hundred stupid ways every day. First playful and then maddening, these strange experiences were the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis, an incurable and degenerative neurological disease. 

As his young daughter starts to investigate the world around her, he, too, finds himself exploring a new landscape - the shifting and bewildering territory of the brain. He is a tourist in his own body, a stranger in a place that plays bizarre tricks on him, from dizzying double vision to mystifying memory loss. 

Determined to master his new environment, Christian takes us on a fascinating and illuminating journey: through the history of neurology, the joys and anxieties of parenthood and the ultimate realisation of what, after everything you take for granted has been stripped away from you, is truly important in life. 

An Unmapped Mind is a profoundly personal, uplifting and enriching memoir that will change the way you see your body, your mind and the world around you. 

©2018 Christian Donlan (P)2018 Penguin Audio

A much-needed reflective narrative of MS

A thoughtful, literary reflective narrative of a disease unique to each person who has it. Grateful to read this at just the right time.