Mother Daughter Widow Wife is a literary fiction book by author Robin Wasserman.
The story revolves around a woman with no memory, scientists are studying her and her daughter yearns to be understood.
Wendy Doe is a woman with no past and no future. She doesn’t have any memories of who she is. She was diagnosed with dissociative fugitive, a transient amnesia that could go away at any time – or never – and was invited by Dr. Benjamin Strauss to observe the trial at the Institute for Mental Research. miss your Meadowlark.
To Dr. Strauss, Wendy is a female body, subject to his investigation and control. For Strauss’s ambitious student, Lizzie Epstein, she was an object of fascination, a mirror of Lizzie’s own desires, and an invitation to wonder: when women were unbound. by all past and present obligations of a woman, who is she allowed to be?
For Alice, the daughter she left behind, Wendy Doe is an absence so it now threatens to tear Alice’s world apart. Through their efforts to untangle Wendy’s identity – as well as her struggle to build a new self – Wasserman has created an “artistic meditation on memory and identity.”
This is an interesting book that provoked a lot of thought. It is centered around three women: Lizzie, a young graduate fellow in psychology doing research with a renowned psychiatrist, Wendy Doe, their subject who is in a fugue state with no memory of her life, and then, in a second timeline, Alice, Wendy’s daughter, who comes to Lizzie looking for answers. It’s been marketed as a mystery/suspense book, and while there are those elements there, it’s really more a work of literary fiction dealing with questions of construction of identity. It’s good, but not quite great.
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Mother Daughter Widow Wife
- A Novel
