PRAISE FOR ALICE LAPLANTE AND
‘Wonderful. This harrowing exploration of the slow disintegration of the mind is deeply touching and utterly heartbreaking, while also being a compelling page-turner. I loved it.’
S. J. WATSON
‘Really terrific—ambitious, clever and human.’
NICCI FRENCH
‘An electrifying book, impossible to put down…a tour de force that can’t be a first novel—and yet it is. I’ll read whatever LaPlante writes next, and the sooner the better.’
ANN PACKER
‘[A] startling portrait of a fiercely intelligent woman struggling mightily to hold on to her sense of self… fascinating on so many levels, from its poignant and inventive depiction of a harrowing illness to its knowing portrayal of the dark complexities of friendship and marriage.’
‘LaPlante’s characters are completely convincing, the plotting masterful.’
DONNA LEON
‘Alice LaPlante’s brilliantly original novel took me not simply into the life of a woman falling apart, but directly into her crumbling brain as she tries desperately to keep her sense of her own identity from slipping away. She held me there for three hundred riveting pages—and for weeks after i’d turned the last one.’
JOYCE MAYNARD
‘A haunting story masterfully told.’
Alice LaPlante is an award-winning writer who teaches at San Francisco State University and Stanford University, where she received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and held a Jones Lectureship. Raised in Chicago, she now lives with her family in Northern California.
ALICE LAPLANTE
TURN
MIND
TEXT PUBLISHING MELBOURNE AUSTRALIA
textpublishing.com.au
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
Copyright © Alice LaPlante 2011
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published in 2011 by The Text Publishing Company
Cover design by Susan Miller
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Author: LaPlante, Alice.
Title: Turn of mind / Alice LaPlante.
ISBN: 9781921758423 (pbk.)
Dewey Number: A823.4
Primary print ISBN: 9781921758423
Ebook ISBN: 9781921834608
TURN
MIND
CONTENTS
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ONE
Something has happened. You can always tell. You come to and find wreckage: a smashed lamp, a devastated human face that shivers on the verge of being recognizable. Occasionally someone in uniform: a paramedic, a nurse. A hand extended with a pill. Or poised to insert a needle.
This time, I am in a room, sitting on a cold metal folding chair. The room is not familiar, but I am used to that. I look for clues. An office-like setting, long and crowded with desks and computers, messy with papers. No windows.
