Kimberly Warner and I are sharing a couch at a Portland coffee shop. For her, around her, the room is spinning, never stable. It undulates, reforms, reshapes in a sensation akin to the dissonance one might feel stepping off a moving vessel onto a stable pier. It never stops: She feels this discombobulation every moment of every day.

It took doctors years to figure out what caused the dizziness: mal de débarquement syndrome, a rare vestibular disorder marked by continual dizziness. The only relief is being in passive motion, like traveling in a car.

She writes about her illness and the way it has changed her life in her new memoir, Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery and the Currents That Carry You. But this book is about so much more than illness. It is about seeking and finding and family and adventure and grief, and maybe a thousand other things.

The crash

In 2015, while Warner was biking in Portland, someone opened a car door directly in her path. She flipped over and landed hard, shattering her pelvis. In the years that followed, she battled dizziness and self-distrust, unclear what was happening to her and unable to fully describe the weirdness that was now her body, her world.

But more was happening than just changes to her body. During these times, Warner was searching for her father.

Her other father.

The one who conceived her in a one-night stand with a married woman. The one who disappeared so completely from her mother’s life that it took Mom years to remember his last name. Meanwhile, her mother stayed married to the doctor whom Warner grew up thinking of as her father.

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Uncovering the mysteries of her relationships with both fathers suffuses Unfixed. It is a long meditation on learning to live with grief for the departed — Warner’s dad died in an accident when she was 17, and her biological father drowned — and the further grief generated by a medical condition she struggles to describe.

From Substack to book

In 2018, as a therapy of sorts, she wrote her story, interweaving her childhood, her accident, her search for her biological father, and her relationship with her mother. She wrote about her abandoned efforts to have a career in medicine, inspired by her father, the doctor.

She batted out the manuscript in about three-and-a-half months, then stored it on a hard drive and went on with her professional life, taking award-winning photos and crafting documentary videos.

Then, during the pandemic, Warner began releasing her memoir, chapter by chapter, on the internet publishing platform Substack. As is the dream of many a Substack writer, she was approached by a publisher, in this case Empress Editions, an independent publisher based in Cambridge, Mass., that specializes in the writings of midlife women.

Bringing it all home

The language of Unfixed is plain yet poetic, precise in rhythm and gentle in metaphor.

Warner’s journey, crackling with electricity, awareness, and awakening, traverses a dreamscape of knowing and pain. The stage is set in early life for various illnesses, and then the dizziness. Experience flows, flaws are examined, scabs scratched.

She follows the breadcrumbs to a knowing of her biological father, a man who is already dead before she starts seeking him. Through DNA analysis, she encounters a whole new family. Unfixed includes imaginary letters written to her biological dad, Charlie Brauer, meditations of her search for him — and herself.

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In a recent Substack posting, “In defense of hollow wombs,” she writes about her mother:

She tells me she has not read my memoir once, but three times now, each reading revealing rooms inside rooms. She tells me she’s proud. That the book changed her. And I try to let that in without deflecting. Though the truest deflection is this: You wrote this too, Mom. You midwifed every word through your own resonance. Her birthing me into the world was merely the first strike of the mallet. Everything since has been reverberation.

The role of grief

In her memoir, Warner struggles toward resolution. She learns she must embrace imperfection. She comes to understand how grief comes to visit and stays a lifetime.

And how, mercifully, grief also manifests as creativity.

Warner, 50, lives on a small farmstead in Washington County, west of Portland, with her husband, David McLaughlin. She is the founder, producer, and director of Unfixed, focusing on awareness of and advocacy for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. In the words of her website, her work consists of “docu-series, short films, podcasts, memoir and essays — all championing the radical notion that healing and brokenness can coexist. That sometimes broken is the fix.” Her documentary videos and podcasts, freely available, reflect her power as a storyteller, a searcher, an advocate.

Searching, ever searching — not just to understand the dynamics of her relationships with her fathers, but to understand herself. That is the story of Unfixed.

Grief to grief. Wonder to wonder. Journeys of the heart, seekings of the soul: Unfixed is what comes when a poet writes a book.

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