Anomalous Affections: A Novel

In middle age, Lin is diagnosed with a chronic disease. Yearning for change and solitude, she finds affirmation in the life of the eighteenth-century French writer Isabelle de Charrière. Seeking an explanation for her condition, Lin examines her own stressful childhood, torn between her father’s love and her mother’s jealousy. She describes her unrequited passion in her twenties for an older man – a relationship that would be repeated thirty-five years later in therapy.

In the course of this eroticised transference her feelings of love alternate with rage, and the power imbalance between patient and therapist is laid bare. She emerges with a new sense that her emotional anomalies, like her physical ones, must be accommodated, without blame or bitterness.

This is a searing tale from a patient’s perspective of therapy, loneliness, and resolution.