*Finalist for the 2021 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction*
From the author of Girls on Fire comes a âsharp and soulful and ferociously insightfulâ (Leslie Jamison) novel centered around a woman with no memory, the scientists studying her, and the daughter who longs to understand.
Wendy Doe is a woman with no past and no future. Without any memory of who she is, sheâs diagnosed with dissociative fugue, a temporary amnesia that could lift at any momentâor never at allâand invited by Dr. Benjamin Strauss to submit herself for experimental observation at his Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research. With few better options, Wendy feels she has no choice.
To Dr. Strauss, Wendy is a female body, subject to his investigation and control. To Straussâs ambitious student, Lizzie Epstein, sheâs an object of fascination, a mirror of Lizzieâs own desires, and an invitation to wonder: once a woman is untethered from all past and present obligations of womanhood, who is she allowed to become?
To Alice, the daughter she left behind, Wendy Doe is an absence so present it threatens to tear Aliceâs world apart. Through their attempts to untangle Wendyâs identityâas well as her struggle to construct a new selfâWasserman has crafted an âartful meditation on memory and identityâ (The New York Times Book Review) and a journey of discovery, reckoning, and reclamation. âA timely examination of memory, womanhood and power,â (Time) Mother Daughter Widow Wife will leave you âutterly rivetedâ (BuzzFeed).