Beauty in the Broken Places: A Memoir of Love, Faith, and Resilience

A deeply moving memoir about two lives that 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’s husband suddenly lost consciousness. After an emergency landing, she discovered that Dave-a healthy thirty-year-old athlete and surgery resident-had suffered a rare and life-threatening stroke. Next thing Allison knew, she was sitting alone in the ER, in Fargo, waiting to hear if her husband would survive the night.

When Dave woke up, he could not carry memories from one day to the next. Within a few months, she found herself caring for both a newborn and a sick husband, sifting through endless hospital bills and insurance paperwork, and 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. Her letters would provide Dave with the memories he could not make on his own. Those letters became the foundation for this beautiful, intimate memoir. And in the process, she fell in love with Dave 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 husband’s turbulent road to recovery, the shifting nature of marriage, and the struggle of loving through pain and finding joy in the broken places.