What happens when the life you were running toward disappears in an instant?

In August 2000, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth McGlinchey leaves a New Found Glory concert with friends, carrying the music, defiance, and fragile belonging of the Long Island punk scene into the night. Then a drunk driver strikes her as she crosses the street, leaving her with catastrophic injuries, missing memories, and a life suddenly divided into before and after.

As Liz fights through surgeries, rehabilitation, brain injury, and the ache of a body she barely recognizes, she must also confront the older wounds that shaped her: family dysfunction, grief, self-harm, and the desperate wish to feel safe in her own life.

Raw, searching, and ultimately hopeful, The Missing Road is a memoir of survival, identity, forgiveness, and the long, uneven work of becoming whole.