Publishers Weekly has named a Lawrence resident’s memoir one of its Best Books of 2012.

In “Louise: Amended, a Memoir by Louise Krug,” Krug chronicles life after suffering a severe cavernous angioma in her brain, which happened just as she and her then-boyfriend were beginning post-college life together on the California coast.

“In gracefully stark prose, Krug narrates in the third person the implosion of what should’ve been her gilded life, the sad and prolonged dissolution of her relationship with Claude, and her transformation from ‘the kind of girl other girls only pretended to like’ to a wife, mother, and PhD candidate back in Kansas,” says the Publishers Weekly review. “Interspersed throughout are fictional imaginings of the perspectives of her loved ones as she endures numerous surgeries and years of physically and emotionally excruciating rehab. Supplemented with facsimiles of the ‘Illustrated Facial Exercises’ she used to work damaged muscles, as well as other medical documents, Krug’s story is an immediate, unsparing, and beautifully rendered account of loss and recovery.”

The book began as Krug’s thesis for her master’s degree in creative writing at Kansas University. After that, she says, it became a personal project she hoped to get published, and succeeded.

She said she heard about the Publishers Weekly list from a representative with her publisher, Black Balloon, and was “definitely surprised.”

Krug, wife of Journal-World photographer Nick Krug, is currently working on her doctorate in creative writing at KU.