The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HUDLPJU | Format: EPUB
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia Description
Imagine waking up in a train station in India with no idea who you are or how you got there. This is what happened to David MacLean.
In 2002, at age 28, 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 malarial medication he was taking. Upon hisreturn 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.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 6 hours and 43 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: January 14, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HUDLPJU
On October 17, 2002, David MacLean woke up on a train platform in Hyderabad, India. He had no idea where he was or why he was there. Not only that, but he didn't even know WHO he was. Mr. MacLean hadn't been sleeping -- he was standing when he came to -- and he hadn't been drinking or taking drugs. Illegal drugs, that is. He had been taking an anti-malarial medicine, Lariam (mefloquine). In time, he discovers he suffered a mental break and total amnesia as a result of taking that drug while living in India on a Fulbright scholarship.
Through the proverbial kindness of strangers, Mr. MacLean is passed along to a dizzying succession of good Samaritans, some with their own theories of his problem. "There, there," says a police officer at the train station. "You foreigners come to my country and do your drugs and get confused. It will be all right, my friend."
And, eventually, it seems that everything is all right. It's eleven years down the road, and Mr. MacLean has written this eloquent account of his ordeal. But his recovery has been a long, agonizing one that has severed the person he used to be from the person he is now. In many ways, the divide levels him with shame-inducing guilt and regret. He learns, for example, that he might once have been a self-involved narcissist who didn't have a lot of respect for other people.
Not only is Mr. MacLean's story fascinating, but his prose is arresting and deeply affecting. Here's how he writes -- newly introspective and grateful -- about the human urge to help others: "In the chaos of this world, where we carom and collide in that everyday turbulence, there's something about the specific gravity of the helpless individual, the lost and the fractured, that draws kindness from us, like venom from a wound.
David Maclean a budding writer on a grant in India suddenly wakes up at a train station with no ID. He has no idea of who he is. Rather than a secret agent story of uncovered clues and flashes of realization, he has completely lost who he was, even after his family and identity are known to him. He realizes he’s not that man any more.
I found this book fascinating on many levels. One as an entertaining read: David Maclean is a great writer and the book flows. Sometimes it flows from one psychotic incident to another and other times it is the day to day things that he stumbles on.
I found it interesting how he pieced together that his emotional state at the time of losing his memory was responsible for his feeling emotions of regret, shame and apologetic when he became aware that he had no idea who he was. He had no action to recall these emotions to, so was struggling to put an action to a reaction.
His discussion of emotions and how he perceived things in his less than sane states was very well done. He captures how he perceived different people and situations that makes you feel like you are right with him. Granted I’m sure this was pieced together by all sorts of notes over many years, but there is an immediacy to the way he writes about it.
It had to seem odd looking at pictures of your former self and to talk to people in many ways in the 3rd person. I often wonder if he felt envious of himself or less than who he used to be, a sort of peculiar jealousy. It seemed that way at times. He also seemed not to like the old him very much either. Funny how much your memory of past events affect how you act now. Erase those events, influences, you have less data to work on on how to act.
There were a few moments where I laughed out-loud.
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