caroline Laner Breure was a perfectionist growing up. She was restless and hungry, with an independent spirit. It was this urge that led her to leave her home country of Brazil after graduating and move to Sydney.
She pursued her dream of living in Bondi and started traveling the world with her boyfriend.
“I felt like I wanted to be perfect in every aspect,” Breuere tells Guardian Australia.
“I wanted to be better at everything, including friends or partners or work. I always wanted to be perfect.
“But now (I’m) not too worried.”
Her life changed course dramatically during a holiday in Spain in September 2019, when she stepped off a curb on her way to breakfast – and into the path of a car.
First her head hit the car’s windshield before her body flew into the air. The force was so great that her Birkenstocks and phone were thrown to either side of the street, where they were picked up by passing strangers.
Breure obviously remembers nothing about that. Speaking via Zoom with Bradley Taylor Greive, the bestselling author of Penguin Bloom and The Blue Day Book, she explains how the pair pieced together the fragments of her story – including the accident itself – for their new book, Broken Girl.
Breure is in Lisbon while Taylor Greive is in Los Angeles, and as they slowly break down my questions and her experience into small, manageable chunks, they reveal – in a small way – how they managed to piece together her story in two and a half years . -six months and thousands of messages sent back and forth in different time zones. Written from Breure’s perspective, the result is a book that is often both atmospheric and ambiguous, with a deliberately unreliable narrative voice. Grieve hands out breadcrumbs of details and memories to the reader, just as Breure himself experienced it.
The paramedics placed Breure in an induced coma and she was diagnosed with a grade 3 diffuse axonal injury at a hospital in Barcelona. The doctors gave her a 5% chance of survival, with a good chance that she would remain in a permanent vegetative state even if she did pull through.
In their book, Taylor Greive and Breure draw on official reports and witness statements to imaginatively recreate the aftermath as Breure lay in a hospital bed. If she were a work of art, the book says, it was “Botero meets Hieronymus Bosch,” as her mind “walked the slackline between this dimension and the next.”
They explain how left brain damage left her with Wernick’s aphasia, a language and comprehension disorder, and how she had to relearn everything she once took for granted. The simple act of using her hands became something like “asking five caterpillars to pick up a spoon.”
After leaving the hospital, she faced a brutal cycle of physical therapy, facial paralysis rehabilitation, personal training, speech therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, occupational therapy and sleep therapy.
Her life had changed, but it took a while for it to sink in; As her brain slowly rewired itself, she often forgot about the accident and her ongoing recovery.
“I wasn’t even aware that I had been in an accident; it took me more than a year to find out,” says Breure. “And by then I personally felt 100% better, you know? I was perfect.”
It was through others’ reactions to the visible changes in her appearance and mannerisms that she came to fully appreciate what she had experienced, and her new reality. “I wasn’t aware that people could see me (differently) in the way I walk, the way I talk, in each way.”
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After eventually returning to Australia, she was also struck by the loneliness of a condition that could have been obvious to anyone but her. It made her feel invisible and forgotten.
“I feel like a lot of people ended up leaving me because they could see that I wasn’t going to make any progress; that I would always be like this, you know?
Feeling frustrated and isolated in her adoptive home, she returned to Barcelona three years after the accident to visit the crash site and hospital where she had spent months unconscious.
While her friends in Australia struggled to reconcile the Caroline before them with the friend who had left for Europe years earlier, the staff and doctors who had been by her side during her treatment and recovery knew in detail what she had been through, and how far she had come – even if her memory loss meant they were virtually strangers to her.
“It was just amazing… They were smiling and so happy it was almost like I was a celebrity even though I didn’t know them. Of course I knew them when I was in a coma, or when I was trying to walk and talk, but they remember me very well. And they were so happy to see me.”
They asked her if she wanted to see the room where she had been cared for for months. “I thought, ‘Yes, of course,’” Breure says. “But it didn’t bring back any memories – I can’t remember anything.”
She and Grieve became like detectives searching through the clues of her own life. It was tempting to put life before the accident on a pedestal, but when her memories returned and she remembered the password to her old laptop, she was reminded that her old life wasn’t always perfect.
“It was a bit revealing, like finding out my password, or the photos I took, or receipts,” she says.
Breure had previously imagined her life as happy, but these details revealed a more complicated truth. “I thought, ‘That was great, I had so many friends,’ blah blah,” she says. But then she found out: “It wasn’t really like that.” Her mother told her that she had been depressed, that she was not really happy.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she says of feeling like she had no direction after the crash.
She struggled to get her old life, friendships and business back on track in Sydney, so she decided to start over. At the beginning of 2023 she moved to Portugal with her cat Sundy.
“Where I was in Bondi and Sydney, I felt like there was a tattoo on my forehead that said ‘brain injury’ or ‘accident’,” she says. “I just felt like I had a stigma.”
Before her accident, Breure had little appreciation for the small and seismic ways life can change after a traumatic brain injury. Working with Grieve became a way to demystify the experience for herself and the readers, and a hard-won act of resistance on her part – to let the world “forget” her.
“There are definitely a few days where I feel like ‘oh, I’m definitely a broken girl’ because I make quite a lot of mistakes, whether it’s related to a brain injury or not. But there are other times when I’m not (I feel broken).
“It’s been four and a half years and I feel like I’m perfect just the way I am.”