The Mind Reels

In his debut novel, inveterate polemicist Fredrik deBoer shines a merciless light on our pervasive need to romanticize debilitating mental illnesses into dainty, loveable quirks. In a dorm room at her safety school, surrounded by cornfed boys and contemptuous girls, Alice is losing her mind. Her first semester is spent clinging to middling grades between drunken hookups and roommate fights. The next brings sleepless nights, extreme weight loss, and effortless, compulsive energy, paused only by an unexpected summoning from the RA for evaluation. Thus begins an endless march of lithium, antidepressants, and Klonopin; doctors and therapists—when health insurance allows—along with overwhelmed parents and well-intentioned friends; all helpless bystanders as Alice descends deeper into chaos. Evoking the wry precision of a digital age Flaubert, The Mind Reels is as horrific and captivating as an impossibly intrusive case study, peeling back society’s polite trappings to expose the realities of mental illness.