Leaving La-La Land: Escape to Reality

Imagine one moment you are renovating your condo. Next, you are on the floor. Your contractor finds you only because he hears you fall. What if you woke up and your entire identity was gone?
In Leaving La-La Land: Escape to Reality, the loss is absolute: memory slips away, time dissolves, identity fractures, and even the body refuses to obey. When Rob opens his eyes in a hospital, he doesn’t know where he is, who he is, or what’s happening to him—and neither do the doctors.
Rob becomes the center of a medical mystery. Specialists surround him with theories, tests, and urgent questions, but answers remain elusive. As his body falters, his mind drifts somewhere far stranger.
Trapped between consciousness and chaos, Rob is pulled into vivid, surreal worlds that feel more real than reality itself. He is no longer a patient—he is a fighter in a secret Muay Thai tournament, a husband in Japan. These alternate lives are intense and emotional.
Eventually diagnosed with a rare and baffling brain condition—encephalopathy— a condition most people have never heard of, fewer have a partial recovery and still fewer can describe it from the inside, like this unique memoir.
Meanwhile, nurses and doctors meticulously document his behaviour, piecing together a part of the story Rob cannot tell. Through their notes and his haunting dream fragments, a gripping, surreal, and profoundly human medical memoir evolves. It’s unlike any memoir you have read.
A rare and powerful memoir told from the patient’s perspective, Leaving La-La Land: Escape to Reality guides readers through both the illness and the experience of encephalopathy. Rob's recovery is incomplete, but his transformation is permanent. Gripping, surreal, and deeply human, it explores the fragile boundary between reality and illusion—and asks a haunting question: if you lose your mind, how do you claw your way back?