Mary Tuchman was an egotistical CEO, enormously successful – and proud of being a self-made business success at the peak of the financial game in the 1990s. A cerebral hemorrhage leaves Mary comatose in a hospital ICU. She ‘awakens’ to find that her world has shifted around her: new alliances have formed, and what she valued in the past does not seem so valuable in the new light of her loss.

Mary finds herself shedding the cutthroat ambition that led her to extraordinary business success, and turning instead to new and unexpected ways of seeing the world. In a heart-breaking and honest memoir, Tuchman analyzes the life she built before her personal disaster and concludes that it is a meaningless place built on poisoned ground. So she tears it down and starts over: acts of courage propel her forward, and within five years, she finds that she is learning “how to love.”