The Education of Mrs. Bemis - Hardcover

Sedgwick, John

3.46

180 ratings by Goodreads

9780060195656: The Education of Mrs. Bemis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060195657 ISBN 13: 9780060195656

Publisher: Harper, 2002

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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.

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About the Author:

John Sedgwick is the author of the novels The Dark House and The Education of Mrs. Bemis, and contributes regularly to Newsweek, GQ, and The Atlantic, among other publications. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

From Publishers Weekly:

The personal values of what could be called Upper Boston are as important as the two main characters Mrs. Bemis and Alice Matthews, the young psychiatrist who tries to help her in journalist and author Sedgwick's engaging and warm if finally confounding novel. Since Madeline Bemis is 76 when Dr. Matthews finds her curled up almost catatonic on a bed in Filene's department store, it's obvious that treating her will involve considerable backtracking. Equally obvious is that these two women one from a working-class family in a rust-belt town, the other imperious and rigid after a lifetime in the Brahmin precincts will find commonalities in the process. When she was 18, Madeline was engaged to a bomber copilot stationed in England during WWII. Waiting at home for her life to begin, she had an affair with an Irish gardener who left her pregnant. She was sent away to have the baby and give him up for adoption. When her fiance returned, permanently disabled, they settled into a remote marriage. Sedgwick (The Dark House) creates a striking portrait of Mrs. Bemis's time and place, as well as of likable but insecure Dr. Matthews, who is battling her own professional and emotional problems. The plotting is less assured, with a central mystery that's resolved in a melodramatic fashion, but the narrative succeeds as an appealing story of a shared journey.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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