Women's Speaker Series: Allison Pataki, author of Beauty in the Broken Places

May 14, 2018 - 7:00pm

Women's Speaker Series: Allison Pataki, May 14, 2018

Fee: $30/$25 members - includes an autographed copy of Beauty in the Broken Places, refreshments from MKE Localicious, and admission to the sculpture garden. Registration for this event is closed.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads produces this series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series and Boswell Books welcome Allison Pataki, author of Beauty in the Broken Places: A Memoir of Love, Faith, and Resilience, back to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Monday, May 14, 7 pm.

About Beauty in the Broken Places

A deeply moving memoir about a young couple whose lives were changed in the blink of an eye, and the love that helped them rewrite their future

Five months pregnant, on a flight to their “babymoon,” Allison Pataki turned to her husband when he asked if his eye looked strange and watched him suddenly lose consciousness. After an emergency landing, she discovered that Dave—a healthy thirty-year-old athlete and surgical resident—had suffered a rare and life-threatening stroke. Next thing Allison knew, she was sitting alone in the ER in Fargo, North Dakota, waiting to hear if her husband would survive the night.

When Dave woke up, he could not carry memories from hour to hour, much less from one day to the next. Allison had lost the Dave she knew and loved when he lost consciousness on the plane. Within a few months, she found herself caring for both a newborn and a sick husband, struggling with the fear of what was to come.

As a way to make sense of the pain and chaos of their new reality, Allison started to write daily letters to Dave. Not only would she work to make sense of the unfathomable experiences unfolding around her, but her letters would provide Dave with the memories he could not make on his own. She was writing to preserve their past, protect their present, and fight for their future. Those letters became the foundation of this beautiful, intimate memoir. And in the process, she fell in love with her husband all over again.

This is a manifesto for living, an ultimately uplifting story about the transformative power of faith and resilience. It’s a tale of a man’s turbulent road to recovery, the shifting nature of marriage, and the struggle of loving through pain and finding joy in the broken places.

About the Author

Allison Pataki is the author of the bestselling novels Sisi, The Traitor’s Wife, and The Accidental Empress, as well as the co-author of Where the Light Falls, with her brother Owen Pataki, and two children’s books. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Pataki and her husband, Dave Levy, are passionate about raising awareness of the difficulties of life after a stroke or traumatic brain injury. The daughter of former New York State governor George E. Pataki, Allison Pataki graduated cum laude from Yale University and lives in New York City with her family.


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