Annie Liontas on brain injuries, Lit Friends, and hidden stories

This website didn’t exist when Annie Liontas published their debut novel Let Me Explain You in 2015. If we did it would have been named a Best Debut Book of 2015. Readers have waited a long time for the follow-up to their debut and luckily for all of us, their debut memoir Sex with a Brain Injury is equally as brilliant.

We caught up with Annie Liontas to see what life has been like since 2015, what writing their memoir was like, and what the future holds.

Your debut novel Let Me Explain You came out in 2015, which was the same year you co-edited an anthology called A Manner of Being. What have you been up to since?

I went and got a couple of brain injuries!  But then I started to get better and rebuild my capacity for storytelling, and I wrote a debut nonfiction collection that confronts how we experience disability—especially when it is invisible.   

Sex with a Brain Injury, an informed memoir, weaves history, philosophy, and personal experience.  It asks after queer resilience, how we endure despite great suffering.  I enlist the cultural criticism of Melissa Febos and the rebellious, iconic dancing of Rosie Perez.  Virginia Woolf, of course, makes multiple appearances.  A piece on Henry VIII—whom Yale University recently diagnosed post-mortem with a debilitating brain injury—interrogates anger. The book draws on public and historical figures to convey for readers the scope and extent of head trauma, such as Harriet Tubman, Lady Gaga, and Olympian Kelly Catlin, who took her own life after a mild TBI. But some pieces resist intellectualization. They insist: this is what it feels like to have been hurt in this way.  This is how a marriage suffers when one of us is sick.   In one essay—a Q&A—I interview my wife about what it was like for her to go through that experience, and to watch me go through it.  Then I hand her the interview transcript and a black Sharpie and tell her she can cross out anything she wants.  She crosses almost nothing out. 

You also just launched a podcast called Lit Friends. I loved it; especially the one with Angela Flournoy & Justin Torres! Tell readers a little bit about what they can expect from it and why you choose to do it.

That was such a great episode!  The story about Angela giving birth in Justin’s bathtub is one I think about allll the time.  Our newest episode with Melissa Febos and Donika Kelly is also amazing–queer married geniuses who also have a beautiful literary friendship.  We ask, “How do you seduce one another on and off the page?”

We are soooo excited about LitFriends, which celebrates the love affair that is literary friendship.  My co-host Lito Velázquez and I invite two (or more!) lit besties to talk with us about art, making one’s way as a writer, and what makes their friendship unique. We’re thrilled to now be partnering with The Center for Fiction, and we’ll be collaborating on some very cool programming soon, including live events.  

When we launched LitFriends, we could not have imagined how moving, beautiful, funny, and intimate these conversations would be.  From bad reviews, to sexy emails, miracles in bathrooms, and tender invitations in response to unfathomable grief—these connections remind us why we do this work, and who keeps us going.

We hope you’ll follow us on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok & share with your lit bestie!  

Your book Sex With a Brain Injury is a brilliant memoir in essays. How did writing it come about?

Toni Morrison says: If there’s a book you want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.  During my long recovery after suffering multiple concussions, I went seeking understanding—I didn’t know what was happening to me.  I couldn’t find any answers, not in my family, nor in my community, nor among support groups, not even in books, which are my greatest refuge.  Because writing is always how I meet the world, I decided to put it all onto the page—my fears, my rage, my physical suffering, my marriage, experiences of intimacy and questioning, what it’s been like to claw my way back.  I was stunned to find that in writing this book, I was forced to reckon with my own queer mother’s battle with addiction, and to recognize similarities in our suffering.  My hope was that others who had incurred head trauma and were suffering from post-concussive disorder would feel less alone, more seen.  What I learned as I wrote this book was just how invisible and ubiquitous the “silent epidemic” is:  3.8 million athletes, 415,000 veterans, 1.4 million concussions each year.  One out of every two people experiencing houselessness has a head injury, usually acquired before they ever lost their home.  Women experiencing domestic violence can sustain more head trauma than football players but are seldom diagnosed.  In the criminal justice system, a person is seven times more likely to have a head injury—before they ever step foot in a prison cell.  Such revelations inspired me to co-write “Professor X” with Marchell Taylor, businessman and former inmate, and the co-author of Denver legislation that calls on neurological screenings before sentencing.

Was transitioning from writing and thinking about fiction to thinking about yourself and writing about yourself hard or easy?

I am such a reluctant nonfiction writer!  But this is a story that demands to be told honestly.  We have only false narratives about head injury.  The movies, the NFL, special interests–these have given us a poor understanding of what it means to have a TBI.

With this work, as with all of my nonfiction, I strive to enact the teachings of Annie Dillard, who claims that the literary essay is a moral exercise that involves direct engagement with the unknown whether a foreign civilization or your own mind, and what matters in this is you. I hold even tighter onto the wisdom of bell hooks, who sees the confessional as prelude, the personal as a way to move beyond, to reach beyond the self.  

“Memoirists are the collective memory of culture,” says Louise DeSalvo. “This is why memoir is attacked. Culture trades in forgetfulness.”  These are the words hold onto, too, every time I show up to the page. 

What was the editing and revision process like once you realized you were writing this book? How did it morph into what it is today?

I approached the project with great curiosity.  What does it mean to be injured in this way?  What don’t we see?  Who don’t we see?  Some pieces were deeply informed by my own experience, such as “Dancing in the Dark,” the essay about my relationship with my mother and her struggle with addiction.  I learned, while researching, that the injured brain and the addicted brain look very much alike–that, to the brain, damage is damage.  This rocked me.  My mother and I had been estranged, and I believed for so long that we were nothing alike–but all of a sudden I had to confront the ways our experiences converged.  That reckoning really informed the trajectory of the book, and how intimate and raw the larger work would become.  

I also did a lot of research for the project.  For instance, I worked extensively with Denver businessman, advocate and former inmate Marchell Taylor to write “Professor X.”  The project began as an interview but grew into a much more layered, complex collaboration and co-authorship.  We facilitated the conversation over Zoom for many weeks, and used various narrative approaches–oral storytelling, blended dialogue, investigation.  It’s perhaps the piece I’m proudest of, and I hope it amplifies the good work that Marchell and others are doing.

Finally, as an extension of my work with this book, I recently served as co-PI on a grant proposal with a focus on Disability Studies to launch a Creative Writing “Collaboratory” at George Washington University that serves incarcerated writers and their families. I am delighted to share that the Mellon Foundation has awarded us a grant of $500,000, and we’re partnering with the nonprofit Free Minds to facilitate workshops for incarcerated writers in DC jails. 

What is the biggest thing you learned about yourself as a writer while writing Sex? And, as a person?

I think it has to do with how powerful it is to see people–to really meet them where they are, to join them in their suffering and resilience.  I’m now not only thinking of this as my book, but our book.  The book of the Walking Wounded.

In 2019, Roxane Gay chose the title essay as “Best of,” and it got a little play–and somebody wrote in the comments section, “A couple years out I’m trying to figure out how to make the hidden visible   so that my friends can meet the new me.” This was when I realized the project had a higher calling, one that was both about me and at the same time had nothing to do with me, was in fact beyond me.  I’ve started to appreciate that the hidden gift of injury is the ability to connect with others.  I want to amplify their stories so that we can change our cultural framework around head injury and recognize it for what it is–an invisible disability.

A novel, editing an anthology, a memoir. What interests you? What do you want to explore with your writing next?

I’m really interested in hidden stories and erasure–what gets suppressed or overlooked.  I think that’s probably what drives my work no matter what form it takes.  I am deep into a new novel about the stories and mythologies we pass down—in our nations, cities, families—and how we excavate those truths even when we don’t want to.  I’m flirting with a teleplay about queers in the 1970s.   I’m curious about the experiences and histories of queerness that have been flattened because as our cultural paradigm has shifted, we forget what it took to even get to where we are in 2024.  And I’m also introducing to the world my drag persona Theo Zestos, who is half George Michael, half Greek kamaki, and 100% in love with Katya.