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Random House
July 2011
On Sale: June 21, 2011
368 pages
ISBN: 1400069459
EAN: 9781400069453
Hardcover
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Fiction
The past is not past for Katharine Merrill. Even after two
decades of volatile marriage, Katharine still believes she
can have the life that she felt promised to her by those
first exhilarating days with her husband, Frederick. For two
months, just before Frederick left to fight in World War II,
Katharine received his total attentiveness, his limitless
charms, his astonishing range of intellect and wit. Over the
years, however, as Frederick’s behavior and moods have
darkened, Katharine has covered for him, trying to rein in
his great manic passions and bridge his deep wells of
sadness: an unending project of keeping up appearances and
hoping for the best. But the project is failing.
Increasingly, Frederick’s erratic behavior, amplified by
alcohol, distresses Katharine and their four daughters and
gives his friends and family cause to worry for his sanity.
When, in the summer of 1962, a cocktail party ends with her
husband in handcuffs, Katharine makes a fateful decision:
She commits Frederick to Mayflower Home, America’s most
revered mental asylum. There, on the grounds of the opulent hospital populated by
great poets, intellectuals, and madmen, Frederick tries to
transform his incarceration into a creative exercise, to
take each meaningless passing moment and find the art within
it. But as he lies on his room’s single mattress, Frederick
wonders how he ever managed to be all that he once was: a
father, a husband, a business executive. Under the faltering
guidance of a self-obsessed psychiatrist, Frederick and his
fellow patients must try to navigate their way through a
gray zone of depression, addiction, and insanity. Meanwhile, as she struggles to raise four young daughters,
Katharine tries to find her way back to Frederick through
her own ambiguities, delusions, and the damages done by her
rose-colored belief in a life she no longer lives. Inspired by elements of the lives of the author’s
grandparents, this haunting love story shifts through time
and reaches across generations. Along the way, Stefan
Merrill Block stunningly illuminates an age-old truth: even
if one’s daily life appears ordinary, one can still wage a
silent, secret, extraordinary war.
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