Caroline Laner Breure was a perfectionist growing up. She was restless and hungry, with an independent spirit. It was this drive that led her to leave her home country Brazil after graduating university and move to Sydney.
She pursued her dream of living in Bondi, and set about travelling the world with her boyfriend.
“I felt like I wanted to be perfect in every aspect,” Breure 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 concerned.”
Her life radically changed course on holiday in Spain in September 2019, when on her way to get breakfast she stepped off a curb – and into the path of a car.
First, her head smashed into the car’s windscreen, before her body was sent flying into the air. The force was so great that her Birkenstocks and phone were thrown into opposite sides of the street, to be picked up by passing strangers.
Breure remembers none of this, of course. Speaking over Zoom alongside , Bradley Trevor Greive the bestselling author of Penguin Bloom and The Blue Day Book, she explains how the pair set about piecing together the fragments of her story – including the accident itself – for their new book, Broken Girl.
Breure is in Lisbon while Trevor Greive is in Los Angeles and, as they slowly break down my questions and her experience into small, manageable pieces, they reveal – in a small way – how they managed to assemble her story over two and a half years and thousands of messages sent back and forth across timezones. Written from Breure’s perspective, the result is a book that is often atmospheric as well as ambiguous, with a deliberately unreliable narrative voice. Greive doles out breadcrumbs of detail and memory to the reader, much as Breure experienced it herself.
The paramedics put Breure in an induced coma, and in a Barcelona hospital she was diagnosed with a grade-three diffuse axonal injury. The doctors gave her a 5% chance of survival, with a high likelihood of being left in a permanent vegetative state even if she did pull through.
In their book, Trevor Greive and Breure draw on official reports and witness accounts to imaginatively recreate the aftermath, as Breure lay in a hospital bed. If she was an artwork, the book reads, it was “Botero meets Hieronymus Bosch”, while her mind “tread[ed] the slackline between this dimension and the next”.
They explain how the damage to the left hemisphere of her brain left her with Wernick’s aphasia, a language and comprehension disorder, and how she had to learn from scratch all the things she once took for granted. The simple act of using her hands became like “asking five caterpillars to pick up a spoon”.
After leaving hospital, she faced a relentless cycle of physiotherapy, facial paralysis rehabilitation, personal training, speech therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, occupational therapy and sleep therapy.
Her life had changed but it took a while to sink in; as her brain slowly rewired itself, she would often forget about the accident, and her ongoing recovery.
“I wasn’t even aware that I had an accident – it took me over a year to find out,” Breure says. “And by that time, personally, I felt 100% better, you know? I was perfect.”
It was through other people’s reactions to the visible changes in her appearance and mannerisms that she began to fully appreciate what she’d been through, and her new reality. “I wasn’t aware that people could see me [differently] in the way I walk, the way I talk, in every way.”
After eventually returning to Australia, she was also struck by the loneliness of a condition that could be obvious to everyone but her. It left her feeling invisible and forgotten.
“I feel like a lot of people just left me eventually, because they could see that I wouldn’t progress; that I was always gonna be like that, you know?”
Feeling frustrated and isolated in her adopted home, she returned to Barcelona three years after the accident to visit the crash site and the hospital where she had spent months unconscious.
While her friends back in Australia struggled to reconcile the Caroline in front of them with the friend who left for Europe years earlier, the staff and doctors who had been by her side during her treatment and recovery knew intimately what she had been through, and how far she’d come – even if her memory loss meant they were virtual strangers to her.
“It was just amazing ... They were smiling and feeling 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 just so happy to see me.”
They asked her whether she wanted to see the room where she had been looked after for months. “I was like, ‘Yeah, of course,’” says Breure. “But it didn’t bring me any memories – I can’t remember anything.”
She and Greive became like a detectives sifting through the clues of her own life. It was tempting to put life before the accident on a pedestal, but as 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 used to take, or receipts,” she says.
Breure had imagined her life before as happy but these details revealed a more complicated truth. “I thought, ‘That was amazing, I had so many friends,’ blah blah,” she says. But then she found out “it wasn’t really like that”. Her mother told her she had been depressed, that she wasn’t really happy.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she says of feeling directionless after the crash.
She struggled to reassemble her old life, friendships and business back in Sydney, so she decided to start afresh. In early 2023 she moved to Portugal with her cat, Sundy.
“In Bondi and Sydney where I was, I felt like there was a tattoo on my forehead that said ‘brain injury’ or ‘accident’,” she says. “I just felt like I had that stigma.”
Before her accident, Breure had little appreciation for the small and the seismic ways life can change after a traumatic brain injury. Working with Greive became a way to demystify the experience for herself and readers, and a hard-fought act of defiance on her part – to make the world “unforget” her.
“There are definitely a few days when I feel like, ‘Oh, I’m definitely a broken girl,’ because I do make quite a lot of mistakes, whether it’s related to brain injury or not. But there’s other times when I’m not [feeling broken].
“It’s been four and a half years and I feel like I’m perfect as I am.”
Broken Girl: A true story by Bradley Trevor Greive and Caroline Laner Breure is released by Hachette Australia on 27 March
