The Answer to the Riddle Is Me

Book excerpt: “A deeply moving account of amnesia that . . . reminds us how we are all always trying to find a version of ourselves that we can live with.” —Los Angeles Times 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. He could remember song lyrics, but not his family, his friends, or the woman he was told he loved. The illness, it turned out, was the result of a commonly prescribed antimalarial medication he had been taking. Upon his return to the United States, he struggled to piece together the fragments of his former life. In this “mesmerizing, unsettling memoir about the ever-echoing nature of identity—written in vivid, blooming detail,” he tells the harrowing, absurd, and unforgettable story of his journey back to himself (Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl). “[MacLean] is an exceedingly entertaining psychotic. . . . [A] raw, honest and beautiful memoir.” —The New York Times “If bad things are going to happen, we are lucky when they happen to someone with the wit, humanity and sweetness—to say nothing of an eye for detail and a gift for pacing—that MacLean brings to this wrenching tale. . . . Readers who flip open the book will find MacLean, preserved between pages, goofy and serious, lost and found.” —Chicago Tribune “[MacLean] writes eloquently about the bizarre and disturbing experience of having his sense of self erased and then reconstructed from scratch.” —The New Yorker