quickie book review

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman.

You should read this book. In fact, if any of you all would like to borrow it, lemme know.

This is a memoir of a woman, more or less my age, who in 1986, freshly graduated from college, decides to take off on an ill-advised around-the-world backpacking trip with one of her Ivy League classmates. As a starting point, they go to communist China which has just been opened up (by some definition of "open") to Westerners. It's all very fascinating. And then the classmate begins showing signs of paranoia which eventually leads to a complete psychotic break. Holy crap. Depending on the kindness of strangers and newly-met friends, the author has to get the sick woman out of the country without alerting the officials how far gone she is. Their panic is buoyed by stories of, for example, a Belgian woman who was committed to an asylum in China for a year for hallucinating from a fever.

Extremely riveting story, so much so that while I was reading it at North Station yesterday, I barely heard them calling my train. It would make a great movie, so hopefully someone's on that.

xoxo