In 2002, at twenty-eight years old, David MacLean woke up in a foreign land with his memory wiped clean. 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. Soon he could remember song lyrics and scenes from television shows, but not his family, his friends, or the woman he loved. All of these symptoms, it turned out, were the result of the commonly prescribed anti-malarial medication he was taking. Upon his return to the States, he struggled to piece together the fragments of his former life in a harrowing, absurd, and unforgettable journey back to himself. A deeply felt, closely researched, and intensely personal book, The Answer to the Riddle Is Me, drawn from MacLean’s award-winning “This American Life” essay, confronts and celebrates the dark, mysterious depths of our psyches and the myriad ways we are all unknowable, especially to ourselves.
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Reviews
Mesmerizing - Written in vivid, blooming detail.
Brilliant and painful and hilarious.
A gripping medical mystery, a heartwarming personal journey, and a chilling indictment of the commonly prescribed drug that upended MacLean's life - but left his superb literary skills very much intact.
A who can break your heart, terrify you, and make you laugh all on the same page. The Answer To The Riddle Is Me is a masterful exploration of the funhouse of identity.
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me is a harrowing account of vanishing - What does it mean to be the person you are? How much can be stripped away before you are no longer you? This is a thrilling, fascinating book that resides in the mind as if you lived it yourself.