*Finalist for the 2021 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction*
From the author of Girls on Fire comes a "sharp and soulful and
ferociously insightful" (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, she's diagnosed with dissociative fugue, a temporary amnesia
that could lift at any moment--or never at all--and 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 Strauss's ambitious student, Lizzie Epstein, she's an object
of fascination, a mirror of Lizzie's 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 Alice's world apart. Through their attempts
to untangle Wendy's identity--as well as her struggle to construct a new
self--Wasserman has crafted an "artful meditation on memory and
identity" (The New York Times Book Review) and a journey of
discovery, reckoning, and reclamation. "A timely examination of memory,
womanhood and power," (Time) Mother Daughter Widow Wife will leave
you "utterly riveted" (BuzzFeed).
