Agent: Sam Copeland, Rogers, Coleridge & White (U.K.).
This edgy, intricately plotted psychological thriller establishes Michaelides as a major player in the field. The boundary between doctor and patient blurs as Theo, who admits he became a therapist “because I was fucked-up,” seeks to cure his own emotional problems in the course of treating Alicia. A famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, she lives in a grand house with big windows overlooking a park in one. The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides 4.5 (458) Paperback 14.99 17.99 Save 17 Hardcover 21.49 Paperback 14.99 eBook 12.99 Audiobook 0.00 Large Print 17.99 Audio CD 39. Alicia Berenson’s life is seemingly perfect. Her current therapists reluctantly agree to let Theo treat the heavily drugged Alicia to get her to speak. The Silent Patient is a shocking psychological thriller of a woman’s act of violence against her husbandand of the therapist obsessed with uncovering her motive. Before the murder, Alicia painted a provocative self-portrait entitled Alcestis, based on a Greek myth that seemed to echo her life. Since the day of her arrest, Alicia has never said a word. The evidence against Alicia was clear-Gabriel was tied to a chair and shot several times in the face with a gun that had only her fingerprints. Rage, like fear, is reactive in nature.Psychotherapist Theo Faber, the emotionally fragile narrator of Michaelides’s superb first novel, finagles his way to a job at the Grove, a “secure forensic unit” in North London, where artist Alicia Berenson has been housed for six years since she was convicted of murdering her prominent fashion photographer husband, Gabriel. A tormented, abused child can never take revenge in reality, as she is powerless and defenceless, but she can – and must – harbour vengeful fantasies in her imagination.
But something goes wrong, depending on the circumstances into which we are born, and the house in which we grow up. As Winnicott put it: ‘A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.’ As babies, we are innocent sponges, blank slates – with only the most basic needs present: to eat, shit, love and be loved.
This doesn’t mean that all abused children go on to become abusers but it is impossible for someone who was not abused to become an abuser. A simple analogy might be helpful: a leading psychiatrist in the field of sexual abuse once told me she had, in thirty years of extensive work with paedophiles, never met one who hadn’t himself been abused as a child. “Sometimes it’s hard to grasp why it is that the answers to the present lie in the past.
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