![]() ![]() With the help of a speech therapist and an interlocutor, and with the support of his ex-lover Sylvie, his partner Florence, and his two young children, Bauby found the strength to share his story by painstakingly blinking out a memoir of extraordinary beauty. While gossips in the fashion industry spread rumors around the streets of Paris that Bauby had become a “vegetable,” Bauby, in a hospital north of Paris, near the sea, began to navigate his new world. Over several months of physical and speech therapy Bauby was able to turn his head and make rudimentary sounds-but his life had been cleaved in two. Throughout his experience of “locked-in syndrome,” Bauby could communicate with those around him only by blinking his left eyelid. The stroke severed Bauby’s brain stem from his spinal cord, leaving him fully paralyzed-but conscious, with all of his memories and mental faculties intact. ![]() In December of that year, however, on an ordinary Friday evening, while driving through Paris to pick his son up for a weekend of fun and bonding, he suffered a massive stroke. In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby was the charismatic, worldly, and wealthy editor-in-chief of French Elle. ![]()
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