The Good Patient
A Novel
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Brilliant, acerbic, funny, and relentless, Darien Gilbertson appears to have it all: a successful career, a husband who loves her absolutely, and all the material comforts of a New York life. But Darien is in trouble – on the run from her emotions, and from a past that resurrects itself in acts of self-mutilation she neither understands nor cares to explore. After years of good behavior, Darien is hurting herself again. And this time it's so brutal that her husband, Robert, cannot help but recognize the woman he adores is unraveling before his eyes.
Darien has a history with therapists. She knows exactly what they want – and need – to hear. She has made a game of psychotherapy, spinning outrageous fictions, exposing her doctors' vanities, knowing when to reveal just a little of the truth. When Robert brings her to Dr. Lindholm, she is ready. But in Dr. Lindholm Darien may have met her match: a caring psychiatrist with the patience and skill to see beneath her façade. At once intrigued and resistant, Darien engages Dr. Lindholm in a battle of wits, sure only her pride is at stake. When she stumbles instead upon a buried truth about herself the consequences are devastating, threatening her marriage, her identity, and what she understands about life and love.
Kristin Waterfield Duisberg's The Good Patient is about interiors and exteriors, knowledge and perception, the treachery and triumph of memory. Written in razor-sharp, sparkling prose, it is a story that takes dead aim at a question we all fear: how well do we really know the people we love?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Buried memories drive a young woman to self-mutilation and near madness in this penetrating psychological study by first-time novelist Duisberg. Darien Gilbertson is a 28-year-old Manhattan advertising executive known for her biting sarcasm, morbid humor and party-girl tendencies. But beneath the sleek facade, she hides the scars, bumps and bruises of her secret life she enjoys violently hurting herself. Her husband, Robert, knows of her penchant for pain, but Darien can't seem to stop and refuses to get help. Then she goes too far and breaks her hand. "It was the hand that came between the marble floor and the rest of my body that sent a delicious knife of pain through my arm and to the top of my skull, full of bittersweet promise." Robert forces her to see a psychiatrist, and despite herself, Darien begins to trust cool Dr. Rachel Lindholm. As their sessions progress, fragments of Darien's fractured past slowly emerge; frightened, she regresses. But Dr. Lindholm refuses to give up and eventually Darien has a breakthrough so powerful that she hurts herself again and must be heavily medicated. It is in a drug-induced haze that she faces the horrific childhood memories that have been blocked from her consciousness for years. As she begins to recover, she must make the difficult choice of reliving her past or moving on to an uncertain future. Though a more detailed account of Darien's traumatic childhood might've better grounded the novel, Duisberg brilliantly exposes the many layers of Darien's consciousness and paints a nuanced picture of her marriage, in which love and resentment are tortuously mingled.
