A Tightly Raveled Mind by Diane Lawson

A Tightly Raveled Mind

By Diane Lawson

Nora Goodman is a psychiatrist doing traditional daily psychoanalysis with a small number of patients in San Antonio, Texas. She and her husband, Richard, had moved to his old hometown from Chicago, at his insistence. He is a high profile psychiatrist who consults for the police and on television shows.

They are separated but have two children, Camille and Alex, typical adolescents having a hard time coping with their father having moved out of the family home. Richard is trying to get Nora back into their marriage, holding out ridiculous carrots like membership in the country club, which Nora cares nothing about.

Professor Howard Westerman is Nora’s first patient of the day. He “accidentally” blows himself up in a home lab workshop. A loose gas fitting? Sabotage? Suicide?

Allyson Forsyth is the second patient of the day, a wealthy oil heiress, but she has a great deal of trouble with her marriage. She has “a distracted aloofness that people read as a refusal to be bothered with life’s ordinary concerns. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. I understood that her depression made her move as if underwater.” She has just been to see her divorce lawyer then goes and steps off a high building and kills herself.

Nora hires a private detective, Mike Ruiz, to investigate because she is afraid her patients are being killed. The interactions with Mike develop in an off-kilter fashion to something between a relationship and a noir sexual entanglement that wasn't sexy, just disturbing.

John Heyderman is her third patient of the day, a former military sniper. “He’d been discharged from the military in body only, his internal world stuck in a perpetual cycle of horrific flashback, demonic guilt and deadening denial.” Is he the threat or in danger himself?

There is a lot of talk in the book about the terms of therapy, like countertransference. “About repression. About the power of the Unconscious to put our head up our butt and keep it there.”

The story is told in first person, past tense with A LOT of foreshadowing. “I failed to anticipate each and every one of those fatal events, not to mention the violence I would prove capable of myself.”

Halfway between an old-fashioned noir mystery like the Raymond Chandler books I used to read and a Girl on the Train thriller. The narrator seems like she should be above reproach, but she casts aspersions on her own fallibility early on, saying that she didn’t “see” this or that and that the analyst is usually as in need of therapy as the patient.

Then she goes very far astray, acting at one point as if she is in a fugue state though it could be stress and sleep deprivation.

It was an intriguing book but a bit coarse, much like a Raymond Chandler, but it wasn’t a smooth ride. It was okay, I finished it, but I wouldn't particularly recommend it to anyone I know.