Mother daughter widow wife : a novel
(Book)

Left with no memory of who she is, Wendy Doe arrives at the Meadowlark Institute of Memory Research, where she falls under the control of a doctor and his ambitious student, while the daughter she left behind tries to make sense of it all.

Who is Wendy Doe? The woman, found on a Peter Pan Bus to Philadelphia, has no money, no ID, and no memory of who she is, where she was going, or what she might have done. Shes assigned a name and diagnosis by the state: Dissociative fugue, a temporary amnesia that could lift at any momentor never at all. When Dr. Benjamin Strauss invites her to submit herself for experimental observation at his Meadowlark Institute for Memory Research, she feels like she has no other choice. To Dr. Strauss, Wendy is a female body, subject to his investigation and control. To Strausss ambitious student, Lizzie Epstein, shes an object of fascination, a mirror of Lizzies own desires, and an invitation to wonder: once a woman is untethered from all past and present obligations of womanhood, who is she allowed to become? To Alice, the daughter she left behind, Wendy Doe is an absence so present it threatens to tear Alices world apart. Through their attempts to untangle the mystery of Wendys identityas well as Wendys own struggle to construct a new self.