Publishers Weekly
03/22/2021
Psychiatrist O’Keane draws on her work with patients as she seeks to understand “the nature of the matter of memory” in her thoughtful debut. Her desire to get to the bottom of how memory works, she writes, was inspired by a patient named Edith, who, in the early 2000s, experienced postpartum psychosis and believed her baby had been replaced with a substitute. When Edith recovered, she understood that the events she remembered weren’t real, but insisted that her memory of those events was. O’Keane was fascinated and began to wonder if there was a difference between a memory of an actual event and a memory of an imagined event. O’Keane’s ensuing “journey of memory from sensory experiences of the world and inner feeling states to neural memory lattices” includes dense discussions of the brain’s memory system that spark when she illustrates the glitches cooked into the memory-forming process. One woman, for example, believed her house was haunted and extended that delusion to other places; bipolar disorder warped another patient’s sense of time. O’Keane offers no shortage of intriguing insights and accounts, but readers looking for a cohesive narrative will be left wanting; this lands more as a series of snapshots. Still, it’s an immersive and informative look at how memory works, and what happens when it doesn’t. (May)
Robin Murray Robin Murray
"Veronica O’Keane distills what she has learned about people in her life as a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. The reader will appreciate Dr. O’Keane’s beautiful prose and her caring attitudes, and will effortlessly pick up knowledge about how the brain determines our behavior."
Elizabeth Landau
"A comprehensive tour of the current state of knowledge about how memory operates in the brain."
London Observer
"[O'Keane's] unforgettable trip down memory’s many lanes leaves you with a marvelling awareness of what humans collectively share as memory makers and, at the same time, reminds us that each one of us is a singular translator of our world."
London Sunday Times
"Rich, revelatory and, in the best way, unsettling."
John Banville
"These passages are vivid and immediate, and all the more affecting for the measured and unemphatic manner in which they are set down. If O’Keane is as fine a doctor as she is a prose stylist, her patients are fortunate indeed."
Parul Sehgal
"[A] roving, riverine inquiry into memory, experience, the brain…O'Keane does not try to dazzle us with interpretations and cures, but dazzle she does with the science, the clarity with which she can conjure something as ordinary, as bafflingly complex and beautiful, as a memory forming in the brain."
Philippa Perry
"Wonderful. I love the way Veronica O’Keane writes…difficult concepts made comprehensible with rich case studies. A must read for every counselor, psychotherapist, life coach and psychiatrist."
Robin Murray
"Veronica O’Keane distills what she has learned about people in her life as a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. The reader will appreciate Dr. O’Keane’s beautiful prose and her caring attitudes, and will effortlessly pick up knowledge about how the brain determines our behavior."
