"I had been seeing Ruth for a long time before I met Kathy, and I continued therapy for the first three years of our relationship. I remember the advice Ruth gave me when Kathy and I first got together.: 'Choosing a lover is a lot like choosing a therapist. We need to ask ourselves is this someone who will be honest with me, listen to criticism, admit making mistakes, and not promise the impossible?'"
Alex Michaelides is a British author. The Silent Patient was his first book, and his second book, The Maidens, was published this year. He's also written screenplays for Hollywood movies.
In The Silent Patient a psychotherapist treats a woman convicted of murdering her husband. As he does so his personal life begins to unravel (or does it?), and many of his colleagues begin to question his methods. The goal of his treatment is facilitating the breaking of his patient's years' long silence.
The first half of this book is solid, even if the protagonist is hard to understand or sympathize with at times. The novel deteriorates in the second half, with his personal struggles forming a perplexing counterpoint to what's happening to him at work. The plot twist at the end of the book comes out of nowhere, and the patient's motives for doing what she does are never satisfactorily explained.
The author has complained that his screenplays were "mangled" in other people's hands. While this may be the case, I can't help but think that his screenplays were suffering from the same kind of causal issues as this book, and that the characters he was writing into his scripts were as inscrutable as the characters in this novel. The Silent Patient isn't terrible, but towards the end the characters in it act in an increasingly arbitrary fashion, as if the author had an ending in mind but didn't quite know how to get there.
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