Marilyn Mcgrath

All You Know on Earth Marilyn Mcgrath

Is memory trustworthy? Do our personal narratives rely more on fiction or fact? What role does the creative process play as we construct the past? Doctor Cal Wyatt, fresh from Harvard and Johns Hopkins University, never even considers such questions when he accepts a position at the Arizona Territorial Insane Asylum. An eager Freudian disciple, he convinces the superintendent of the institution to let him test the new talking therapy on a female inmate who appears to have a simple case of amnesia. But Cal soon discovers that nothing about Rachel is simple. It is 1910, a bustling time of progress and change in Phoenix. Automobiles are becoming a common sight. Suffragettes march in the streets. Pancho Villa causes problems across the border. And the newly-constructed Roosevelt Dam is a proud achievement of man's control over nature. But all of these events are irrelevant inside the iron fence of the asylum - a place where time moves at each inmate's solitary pace, where the past and present overlap, and where imagination is sometimes more important than the truth.