Research Catalog

Title

Love in the asylum : a novel / Lisa Carey.

Author

Carey, Lisa

Publication

New York : William Morrow, c2004.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

294 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

"Alba Elliot is tired of being crazy. In and out of Abenaki Mental Hospital more than a dozen times in ten years, fed up with diagnoses that come without cures and a life organized by a days-of-the-week pill case, the twenty-five-year-old children's book writer is waiting for a miracle." "Oscar Jameson, a thirty-year-old drug addict enrolled in the rehab program by his frustrated brother, is not looking for anything so profound. Oscar doesn't believe he has a problem, despite the fact that his "recreation" has cost him everything. He resents the counselors, the other addicts, and his brother, all of whom insist he belongs there. The only activity Oscar looks forward to is the spirited, sarcastic conversations that have begun with Alba on the hospital lawn. And so two damaged souls forge a connection. To call it love would be courting disaster since now bright future could possibly exist between a suicidal manic-depressive and a self-deluding junkie." "Then one day, in the back pages of a hospital library book, Alba finds a letter written seventy years earlier but never sent. Mary Doherty, who was committed by her husband and taken from her children, left behind secret missives about the atrocities done to her and her belief in an ancient healing power. As Alba pieces together Mary's heartbreaking chronicle, she begins to set her hopes in a different kind of medicine." "Brought together by chance, influenced by forces as beautiful and powerful as they are unforeseen, Alba and Oscar will slowly rise from the ashes of despair and self-destruction and, in the midst of righting an old wrong, begin to heal their battered spirits."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject

• Psychiatric hospital patients > Fiction
• Substance abuse > Treatment > Fiction
• Drug addicts > Fiction
• Letter writing > Fiction
• Women > Maine > Fiction
• Women authors > Fiction
• Alcoholics > Fiction
• Maine > Fiction

ISBN

006621288X (alk. paper)

LCCN

2003051246

OCLC

• ocm52134637
• SCSB-4883385

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries