Samina Ali, PIECES YOU'LL NEVER GET BACK: A Memoir of Unlikely Survival
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.4 • 602 Ratings
🗓️ 17 March 2025
⏱️ 22 minutes
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Summary
Award-winning author Samina Ali joins Zibby to discuss her harrowing and redemptive memoir, PIECES YOU’LL NEVER GET BACK. Samina describes her near-fatal childbirth complications: unchecked eclampsia led to a major brain injury and coma as she gave birth. She delves into the long and painful recovery, her struggles with memory loss, and what it was like to write this book—structuring it in short, fragmented chapters to mirror how her brain now processes information. Samina also touches on the systemic medical bias that led to her concerns being ignored, the importance of self-advocacy, and how she has reclaimed her life and her relationship with her now-adult son.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive |
| 0:24.0 | look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't |
| 0:29.3 | have to. |
| 0:30.3 | Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. |
| 0:36.2 | For more information, go to zibbimedia.com and follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens. |
| 0:44.6 | Samina Ali is the author of Pieces You'll Never Get Back, a memoir of unlikely survival. |
| 0:50.3 | Samina is also the author of Madras on Rainy Days, which won the French pre-premier Romance etrangee award and was a finalist for the Penn Hemingway Award in Fiction. |
| 1:01.6 | She is also a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation writer's award. |
| 1:05.4 | She's a public speaker and her TEDx talk, what the Quran really says about the hijab, currently has over 8 million views. |
| 1:12.3 | Her writing has been featured in various outlets from national NPR to The Economist. |
| 1:16.5 | Welcome, Samina. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked with Zibi to talk about pieces. |
| 1:22.1 | You'll Never Get Back, a memoir of Unlikely Survival. Congratulations. |
| 1:26.7 | Thank you, and thank you for having me on. Oh, |
| 1:29.4 | it's my pleasure. Your story is so powerful. I mean, after reading it, I was just like, |
| 1:34.6 | it was a grip your heart, wow, like, foof, kind of story. I just, I cannot believe how |
| 1:40.8 | much you've gone through. I am so impressed you wrote it as a book. I love how |
| 1:45.4 | you did it with these super short chapters that are sometimes only a paragraph at length to sort of mirror |
| 1:50.2 | your mind and all of that. And oh my gosh. So tell everybody what happened to you and how you turned it |
| 1:55.9 | into a book, but basically what happened? So I was 29 when I delivered my son Ishmael. And at the time, |
| 2:04.6 | because I was 29 and because I was very healthy and I didn't have any, you know, health issues at all, |
| 2:12.2 | I was not considered high risk. And I want to emphasize that even though I was born in India, |
| 2:19.9 | I live in San Francisco. So I was at one of the best hospitals in the nation up here at UCSF, |
... |
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