For My Own Good

Mary's nine-month-old was injured while in her care. She does not remember it clearly, which is part of the problem, and she has been on medication ever since that keeps her at one remove from her own days.

Her husband has taken over. She stays in the house, a nanny has been engaged to look after the baby, and every one of these arrangements has been explained to her as being for her own good. Mary agrees with all of it: she could not bear anything else happening to her child, and she does not trust herself.

Vanessa Garbin writes it from inside the fog, so the reader spends the book assembling a version of events out of a narrator who cannot hold one steady. What Mary wants is to think clearly for long enough to win back her husband's regard. What the reader starts to notice, ahead of her, is how much of her condition is being managed rather than treated.