Beschreibung
[8], 292, [4] pages. The author takes us with him on his harrowing journey, which is rendered with exactitude, humor, and lyricism. On October 17, 2002, David MacLean "woke up" on a train platform in India with no idea who he was or why he was there. No money. No passport. No identity. Taken to a mental hospital by the police, MacLean then started to hallucinate so severely he had to be tied down. Soon he could remember song lyrics, but not his family, his friends, or the woman he was told he loved. All of these symptoms, it turned out, were the result of the commonly prescribed malarial medication he had been taking. Upon his return to the States, he struggled to piece together the fragments of his former life in a harrowing, absurd, and unforgettable journey back to himself. David Stuart MacLean is the author of The Answer to the Riddle Is Me, a memoir of his mefloquine induced delirium and amnesia. He has a Ph.D. in Literature/Creative Writing from The University of Houston, an M.F.A. from New Mexico State University and he was a Fulbright scholar in India. He won a PEN/America Center award in 2011 as the Best Emerging Writer in Non-Fiction. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Ploughshares, Bennington Review, Guernica, and the radio program This American Life. MacLean is a visiting faculty member of the creative writing program at The University of Chicago. He has been a guest on Duncan Trussell's podcast The Duncan Trussell Family Hour. Derived from a Kirkus review: A young writer reckons with his life after amnesia. On Oct. 17, 2002, first-time author MacLean came to while standing in a crush of people on a train platform in India. He had no passport and no clue where he was or what his name was. He then panicked and blacked out again. When he regained consciousness, he was still standing on the platform, utterly confused and terrified, when a kindly police officer found and took him under his protection. Had the author not had his driver's license with him, this memoir may never have been written. The 28-year-old MacLean was in Hyderabad, India, studying on a Fulbright scholarship, a world away from the state of New Mexico that had issued his license. In episodic bursts, the author relates moments he recalls from that day forward. Many of the scenes describing his wild hallucinations and slow return to relative sanity powerfully convey an immediacy, as MacLean and his parents, who rushed from the States to the neuropsychiatric institute where he was taken, learned the cause of his "acute polymorphic psychosis." When MacLean was found, those who first assisted him assumed his amnesia and severe disorientation were the result of recreational drug abuse, but blood work soon revealed the culprit to be an allergic reaction to a prescribed drug with a grave history of inducing psychosis: mefloquine, the popular antimalarial drug better known as Lariam. Much of the memoir's power comes from MacLean's intense descriptions of the altered states he endured as he tried to rediscover his identity. Recalling the return to his parents' home, he writes: "I felt myself slipping, worried that I'd never recover, that I'd be in this wood-glue-filled piñata for the rest of my life. And then if I did recover, if I got everything back, who knew if it would happen again? How many times would I end up touring the exhibits of my curated self?" A mesmerizing debut. MacLean spares no detail in tracing his formidable reconstruction.
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