On June 4, 2015, I was sexually assaulted and nearly murdered. I went to bed in the evening, the way I always did. I read. I turned out my lamp. In the dark, I listened to the train in the distance, the one that rumbled past every night at ten-thirty.

I woke in a hospital two days later with no memory of what had happened to me, in a body that I could no longer make work.

“Someone broke into your house and attacked you,” a nervous-faced resident told me. She was young. Maybe unaccustomed to giving bad news.

My life swelled up with this: Someone broke into your house and attacked you. Never mind that I didn’t understand it. Never mind that I didn’t remember it and never would. I spent weeks in the hospital. Anoxic encephalopathy: A lack of oxygen to my brain that had been caused by—what? A pillow on my face? Hands on my throat?…