The Answer to the Riddle Is Me, David Stuart MacLean
The Answer to the Riddle Is Me, David Stuart MacLean
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The Answer to the Riddle Is Me
A Memoir of Amnesia

Author: David Stuart MacLean

Narrator: Neil Shah

Unabridged: 6 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/14/2014

Synopsis

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 twenty-eight, 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 his return 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 MacLeans 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.

About David Stuart MacLean

David Stuart MacLean is a winner of the PEN Emerging Writer Award for Nonfiction and author of the award-winning memoir The Answer to the Riddle Is Me. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Ploughshares, Guernica, and on This American Life. He has taught creative writing at the University of Chicago, Columbia College, and the School of the Art Institute; is co-founder of the Poison Pen Reading Series in Houston; and was a Fulbright Scholar to India. Raised in central Ohio, he now lives in Chicago. How I Learned to Hate in Ohio is his debut novel.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Alli on December 26, 2013

The discussion notes that come with the review copy of this book point point out that "a memoir of amnesia" is a contradiction, and this is, in fact, David MacLean's memoir of recovering from amnesia. It could also be classified as an adventure tale, traveling through India, through mental illness a......more

Goodreads review by Bruce on December 25, 2014

Scary subject nailed in a scarily well-written book. Around page 243 McLean pulls off something extraordinary. He folds seamlessly into his narrative a précis of Alan Moore's powerful story about Superman called "For the Man Who Has Everything," and in so doing bridles a horse that would rather die......more

Goodreads review by Ingrid on August 14, 2014

Like many, I first heard MacLean's horrifying story of waking up on a train platform in India with no memory of who he was on This American Life. It stuck with me, so when the full-length memoir came out this year, reviewed favorably on the usual circuits, I selected it as a non-fiction pick for my......more

Goodreads review by Corey on March 30, 2019

A real-life horror story wherein a young man wakes up in India, entirely unable to remember anything about himself or his past. Eventually, we learn that the young man in question is David McLean, who was in India on a Fullbright scholarship and suffered from severe amnesia due to a side effect of a......more

Goodreads review by Tonya on April 21, 2023

Audio book was stellar. At first the monotone voice irritated me, but when I realized it was intentional because the protagonist didn’t know who he was or what his purpose was, I found it clever as well as like conversing with someone on the spectrum; many of his struggles also felt like spectrum st......more

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