Finalist for the 2021 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction
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. Shea�TMs assigned a name and diagnosis by the state: Dissociative fugue, a temporary amnesia that could lift at any moment a�" or 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 Straussa�TMs ambitious student, Lizzie Epstein, shea�TMs an object of fascination, a mirror of Lizziea�TMs 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 Alicea�TMs world apart. Through their attempts to untangle the mystery of Wendya�TMs identity a�" as well as Wendya�TMs own struggle to construct a new self a�" Wasserman has crafted a jaw-dropping, multi-voiced journey of discovery, reckoning, and reclamation.