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 MacLean's 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.
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“Neil Shah’s smooth voice is perfect for MacLean’s
introspective memoir…Shah grasps MacLean’s utter confusion and panic during the
horrific hallucinations he experienced, caused by an antimalarial drug. Shah
flawlessly simulates the Indian accents of those who tried to help solve the
mystery of MacLean’s identity and why he was in India. The story is both
captivating and thought provoking as MacLean rediscovers his personality, his
past, and his present. Having someone else vocalize this memoir adds to the
sense of an author who has lost his sense of self.”
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AudioFile