THE MIND REELS

The Mind Reels is a short novel about a young woman named Alice who goes to college, and starts to suffer from mental illness, and then suffers more. It draws from the author's experi- ences. It will be Fredrik deBoer's first novel.

It is an extraordinarily straightforward novel, but a thrilling one. Like a boulder rolling down- hill toward a cabin: even though we see where this is going, it is captivating, and not a little frightening. Many other novels and memoirs have depicted mental illness, and treatment. But so many of them shy away from embracing the brisk reality of what it's really like, and, in- stead, attend to familiar storytelling devices and proper arrangements of dramatic tension and release. As deBoer might say: mental illness is not exciting. It certainly does not daintily follow the form of a well-told story. Not in the classical sense. But here, in The Mind Reels, there is an excitement in being permitted to see something develop that almost always develops out of sight. The experience of reading it gives the feeling of an impossibly intrusive case study. It succeeds by tantalizing the reader with an accumulation of very, very true-seeming experienc- es, instead of another collection of cliches. This is a novel that can make a splash, especially with young people. It has a sheerness of real- ity, and a total attention to true detail. No item of Alice's dorm room, or her first drunken par- ty, or her fraying relationships with her friends and family (who only want to help her) is out of place, or out of touch with the truth. This can be a novel that really spreads, because it really tells the truth, and it really doesn't sound like anything else. Fredrik deBoer is a writer and academic. He is the author of two works of nonfiction, pub- lished with St Martin's Press and Simon & Schuster. His newsletter is one of the most shared and subscribed on the substack platform.