BUT FOR FORTUNE

A medical student investigates her grandmother’s history in a psychiatric hospital in Reid’s debut novel.

Corinth Eaton is in her third year of medical school, living with her boyfriend, Adam, and her best friend, Cecily. Her struggles in her surgical rotation are giving her anxiety, and she’s been depressed since the death of her father two years earlier. When a domineering resident forces Corinth to cover up his critical mistake with a patient, Corinth is suspended from medical school. At home, she walks in on Adam and Cecily in the shower. With her personal and professional lives in shambles, Corinth looks to the past for understanding. She begins a rotation at the local psychiatric hospital, where her grandmother, Mary Esther, had been a patient for decades. Corinth retrieves Mary Esther’s old chart from storage to learn more about her history and discover who Mary Esther had been before her long institutionalization sapped her spirit. (“Her whole family disregarded who Granny truly was, who she’d been before the hospitalizations and the drugs and the shock therapy.”) This heartrending novel poignantly acknowledges the many women lost to the inadequate mental health care of the mid-20th century. Though Mary Esther remains alive, she is essentially a lost soul, her spirit buried by her poor medical treatment and the people in her life who failed to understand her. Her history runs parallel to Corinth’s story, which makes some of the protagonist’s discoveries anticlimactic, since Corinth is hunting for information the reader already knows. Mary Esther was often helpless against the prejudices and social mores of her day, and the story excels at conveying the soul-numbing frustration of a woman who’s never given a chance to speak for herself. From her grandmother’s experience, Corinth movingly learns to insist upon her own agency after spending the first half of the novel being browbeaten by more forceful personalities.

An earnest, affecting novel about the painful consequences of the lack of effective mental health care.