‘Mirror Me’ by Lisa Williamson Rosenberg

A character struggles with culture and personal crises.

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Lisa Williamson Rosenberg writes in an author’s note at the end of her new novel “Mirror Me” (Little A), “As authors, we mine our lives for ingredients for the stories we tell.” True enough. Also true, as readers we connect our own life experiences to the characters and stories we are reading about, which is why complicated psychological thrillers like “Mirror Me” can be particularly fascinating to read.

Williamson Rosenberg is a former dancer who now has two novels to her name. She works as a psychotherapist, although part-time these days. Her mother was Jewish and white; her father was Black. I am noting these ingredients in her bio because in “Mirror Me,” Williamson Rosenberg fearlessly takes us into the internal life of a biracial character who appears to have dissociative identity disorder. That she was a dancer is also important, as the novel features dancers and a prestigious dance company.

Eddie and Pär inhabit the same stunningly beautiful biracial body. The product of an unwanted pregnancy supposedly between exchange students studying in America, one from Sweden and one from Africa, Eddie/Pär’s adoptive parents are white, middle-class, and Jewish. His brother Robert, their biological child, is four years his senior.

Eddie is sensitive and agreeable. Pär is prone to sudden and violent outbursts, and when these happen, Eddie has no memory of them, which is where the book begins.

Something unfathomable has happened. A woman was pushed onto the New York City subway tracks in front of an oncoming train. Eddie is sure he did it, and believes the woman he killed was his brother’s fiancée.

You killed her! How could you? Why? Why?”

The story unfolds through the perspectives of Eddie and Pär, who are both unreliable narrators whose memories reveal and conceal. At one point, Pär describes their coexistence like this: “We are matryoshka dolls: one inside the other inside the other.”

After the subway incident, Eddie checks himself into a psychiatric hospital, and it is in sessions with Dr. Richard Montgomery, the noted author of “The Splintered Self,” that Eddie/Pär’s complicated backstory is revealed.

Pär sees his role as Eddie’s hidden protector: “I won’t give myself away. I’ll let Montgomery associate me with some crisis from Eddie’s adolescence, or else implicate Robert — clever, generous, personable, popular, tall, and rotund Robert — from whose dark side I shielded Eddie for so many years, cooling my figurative heels until the moment was ripe for vengeance.”

Eddie is so traumatized by the subway incident that in therapy with Dr. Montgomery, he is unable to speak, and communicates only in writing. In an effort to understand the split within him, Eddie tries to explain his feelings of having a divided identity and otherness: “My mother never let me say Black. She always reminded me that I was only part Black, and that my birth father was African, not American Black. That was what my birth mother had written in the note she left with me along with my name. He was an African exchange student, but she never said which country he was from. I think my mom thought saying ‘African’ was supposed to make me think that I was above other Black people. It made it worse. Like I couldn’t even have anything in common with the Black kids.”

I’m going to pause here to note that this is just part one of the novel, the setup for a book filled with unexpected twists and trysts, switches and swivels, and connective tissue that disconnects. It is a deep psychological probe of identity issues with complexly rendered characters and infusions of magical realism.

I found out about “Mirror Me” from an email informing me that the author blew her first bubblegum bubble on Chappaquiddick when she was 5, and continues to visit the Vineyard. Since The MV Times tries to cover books written by Vineyard-connected authors, and because the description of the book sounded compelling, I asked for an advance copy.

While “Mirror Me” takes place off-Island, Williamson Rosenberg’s first novel, the highly acclaimed “Embers on the Wind,” has a scene on Inkwell Beach, and she wrote about her triumph of finally blowing her first bubblegum bubble, an event that occurred not long after Teddy Kennedy drove off Dike Bridge, in an essay published in “Longreads” that has the fabulous out-of-the-mouth-of-babes line, “‘Guess what happened at Chappaquiddick?’ was how I launched my tale. I didn’t understand until years later why the adults looked askance at my mother and father.”

But back to the book, I’ve often thought epigraphs should be at the end of books rather than the beginning, where we can’t fully appreciate them, as they simply tease us with clues about the story to come, rather than reveal truths about the novel we just finished. And so when I read these words by Walt Whitman, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” before settling in for “Mirror Me,” I didn’t appreciate the context of their meaning. Now I do, as will you after reading “Mirror Me.”

Kate Feiffer is the author of “Morning Pages,” and the event producer for Islanders Write.