A person who has Locked-In Syndrome is aware and awake but cannot communicate verbally. There is a complete paralysis of the voluntary muscles in the body other than the eyes. Green Vegetable is written by a man who has had the condition for twenty years. Although his body is locked in, clearly his intellect, his humor, and his love of life are free roaming.

In 1990 Philippe Vigand experienced an arterial occlusion and collapsed to the ground while walking to work. For two months he was in a coma. When he awoke he found that his organs were intact, as was his brain, but he was completely paralyzed except for the ability to blink. He had Locked-In Syndrome.

Vigand saw Green Vegetable, his fourth book, as a chance to share his love of life and sense of humor with others luckier than him but perhaps not so at peace or so understanding of their lives. He has created a candid and philosophical chronicle of his daily life, a telling of a man's accomplishments and the lessons he has learned after twenty years of living locked in. The core of his story is the immense hope he preserves, and wants to impart, despite the difficult circumstances.

He feels fortunate, he writes, that he can blink and thus was able to create a system of communication, based on eye movement and the letters of the alphabet, as had Jean-Dominique Bauby (author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) before him. Vigand recalls the excitement of the early days, working mostly with his wife, when he was trying to get beyond yes and no, to capture the entire alphabet and then use it to form words. A thrilling breakthrough occurred when he found a computer program that could scan his eye movements, recognizing which letter his eyes were looking at, and record his thoughts as words and sentences that became writings crucial to his ability to communicate with the world, and thereby to survive as a full, participating member of society.

In French, the condition is called maladie de l'emmuré vivant, which translates as "walled-in-alive disease." In Green Vegetable, Vigand makes it clear that he has broken down the walls more than most people who are not locked in. The title of this exciting, hopeful, and philosophical book—Green Vegetable—humorous though it may be, is Vigand's acknowledgment that to most people he is a vegetable. He explains, in a nod to the environment, that if he must be a vegetable, he at least wants to be green.