The Education of Mrs. Bemis Hardcover - 2002

From the publisher

Powerful, elegant, moving, and suspenseful --
the drama of an aged Boston matriarch's
unlikely bond with her young caregiver and
the buried secrets that haunt her

Meet Madeline Bemis, dowager of one of Boston's oldest Brahmin families: gracious, distinguished, refined. Meet Dr. Alice Matthews, resident psychiatrist at the Montrose Psychiatric Hospital: young, smart, passionate, and desperately in search of her own identity. When Alice finds the elderly Mrs. Bemis curled up on a bed in Filene's furniture department, suffering from an apparent breakdown, she immediately wants to help, and arranges to have Mrs. Bemis brought to Montrose.

As her therapist, Alice is soon probing deeper into Mrs. Bemis's past than she ever expected, pushing the formidable woman to reveal her shadowy psychological history. Through memories and dreams, Alice and Mrs. Bemis begin to piece together a heartbreaking saga, replete with shameful secrets and forgotten sorrows, that reaches all the way back to the 1940s, and turns out to be unexpectedly linked to a recent unsolved murder. The two women are drawn to each other in a way that goes far beyond the ordinary doctor-patient relationship, and as their intimacy deepens, Alice realizes that Mrs. Bemis's recovery -- and perhaps even her safety -- depends on her coming to terms with her secret history.

In the tradition of Susan Minot's Evening and Anna Quindlen's One True Thing, The Education of Mrs. Bemis is a mesmerizing and riveting story of friendship, murder, and romance, beautifully told and ultimately redemptive.