“Death is louder than I thought it would be. I could have predicted the blinding white light….But the roar. No one mentioned the roar.”
When the narrator of Melissa Pace’s The Once and Future Me opens her eyes after what she assumes is her death, she finds she is on a bus with bars on the windows and half a dozen other women, and when the bus grinds to a halt, it is in front of a building with a sign: HANOVER STATE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL. She doesn’t know why she is there – she doesn’t even know her name.
Dorothy Frasier, she is told. It is 1954, and she is a paranoid schizophrenic. Everyone says that: the doctors, the man named Paul who says he is her husband. But is he? Why does she keep getting these visions of a future Dorothy, but one named Bix? Why does she seem adept at picking locks and using whatever’s to hand as a weapon? Why do the people in her visions keep telling her she is the only one who can stop the Guest? What the hell is the Guest?
The answers come in a rollercoaster, genre-bending thriller that will keep you guessing, as Dorothy (Bix?) wrestles to separate fact from nightmarish delusion. Is she as crazy as they say – or is the craziness everything around her? “Sometimes,” another inmate says to her, “you need to trust that lunatic voice, ‘cause she’s the only one in your corner.”
Secrets pile up on secrets, and peril upon peril. In the end, she realizes, the only one she can count on for salvation is herself. But what is she trying to save? Her life? Her sanity? Or the world?
Melissa Pace is a former editor and writer for Elle and a past finalist for a prestigious fellowship for emerging screenwriters.
“The Once and Future Me actually started its life as a TV pilot. When it didn’t sell, I buried it deep in my graveyard drawer of unsold pilots, but could never quite forget about it. Years later, Bix’s story still had a grip on me, so as a reward for closing two thorny home sales (I was a realtor at the time), I decided to see if I could expand its scope and turn it into a novel.
“So many thoughts, feelings and inklings factored into why I chose this story to tell, but I’d say the most important of these was my own faulty memory. Ever since childhood, I’ve had a truly mediocre ability to recall events in my life, even some of the important ones that for better or worse have shaped me, made me who I am. My undependable memory forces me to rely on friends and family to fill in the forgotten facts and details. That kind of dependence on others is frustrating, at times embarrassing, and makes me feel vulnerable (what if they’re lying?—this has happened ).
“So the question of who a person might become without any of their formative memories tethering them to their previous self (and keeping them safe from liars!) was really intriguing to me. When you think about it, none of us is simply one person. As we go through life’s blessings and disasters and evolve, all of us cycle through different versions of ourselves. For me it was recluse nature child; followed by nerdy teenager; besotted college student; inexplicably, Elle magazine fashion editor; newly orphaned and numb twenty-five-year-old, overwhelmed mother of three; then onto driven (tunnel-visioned) middle-aged wannabe writer; and now, slightly worse for wear, but elated, debut author. There is no one definition of me. Like many women asked to be many things, my identity is a moving target.”…
To read more of Neil’s review and discussion with Melissa Pace, go here.
