DIane Ackerman: Introducing Paul's 100 Names

In October 2010, I visited authors Diane Ackerman and Paul West at their upstate New York home, where we spent two days talking about Diane's forthcoming book. Several early readers had called it her best to date; without question, it's the most personal, affecting work of her career.

Six years earlier, Ackerman had been on tour, promoting her twentieth book, An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain, when her husband suffered a vicious stroke that stole not only his capacity to speak and write but also his ability to decipher language and symbols of all kinds. Global aphasia, the condition is called. Should Diane count it as a blessing or a curse that she'd spent the previous years studying—and celebrating!—the delicate intricacies of the brain?

Before his stroke, Paul had published more than forty books: novels, stories, poems, and a wealth of nonfiction. He'd been a professor of writing and literature at Penn State when Diane enrolled in his Contemporary British Literature course. That was in the early seventies. Their relationship thrived on a shared love for wordplay from the start.

Despite the frightful event that initiates its action, One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing is no simple, tragic tale. Paul does recover. Within several years, incredibly, he's writing books again. As Donna Seaman noted in a starred Booklist review, from these challenging times Ackerman manages to create "a gorgeously engrossing, affecting, sweetly funny, and mind-opening love story of crisis, determination, creativity, and repair."

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