PIECES OF ME

When art student Dylan blacks out and loses three days of her memory, the life she’s struggling to hold together begins to splinter and change.

Hospitalized after what appears to be a suicide attempt and diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, she embarks on a difficult path to finding peace with her condition, her alternate personalities, and herself, exploring what it means to live a life where you’re not the only person inside your own head. Insecure yet resilient, Dylan is easy to root for, if sometimes underdeveloped as a character beyond her diagnosis. Her traumas are largely presented with care, and her “alters” are given humanity in their own rights. She has a supportive and nonjudgmental network of loved ones and an accepting romantic interest, valuable and still too rare elements in stories about serious mental illness. But Dylan’s journey through the psychiatric system is unrealistically smooth, coming across as textbook and well-meaningly educational. This is combined with elements that make other parts of the novel read like a thriller in their explorations of Dylan’s psyche and its mysteries. The result is an occasionally uncomfortable clash in tone. However, for a condition often given deeply offensive representation, the book does pave new ground, if unevenly, and promotes a message of hope. Main characters read White.

Informs and educates despite some uneven execution.