Trigger warning for suicide.

Graeme Macrae Burnet works his metafictional magic again in Case Study, a tale of unreliable narrators and unstable identities. The narrator of this book—also named Graeme Macrae Burnet—has been working on a biography of a controversial psychologist when he receives a set of five notebooks from a woman who believed that this psychologist was responsible for her sister’s suicide. The narrator shares the notebooks and his chapters for the biography, leaving it up to us readers to puzzle over all kinds of juicy questions about duty of care, psychological care, identity, personality, mental illness, and so much more. I absolutely devoured this book.

Case Study is balanced on two characters. First is the object of the narrator’s biography: A. Collins Braithwaite. Braithwaite is a rebel therapist who fell into psychology after his rebelliousness and failure to be impressed made him a darling of rich actors. To give a sense of his approach to psychology, we see Braithwaite develop a one-sided rivalry with actual historical psychologist and iconoclast, Dr. R.D. Laing, who also challenged mid-twentieth century beliefs about mental illness and the treatment thereof. Braithwaite also throws Freud and psychoanalysis out the window. The second character calls herself Rebecca. We know from the beginning of Case Study that Rebecca is a liar. Rebecca’s less grandiose (though still audacious) plan is to infiltrate Braithwaite’s practice and see if she can find out what he might have done to her sister before Veronica took her own life.

Rebecca’s notebooks and the narrator’s biography set up a fascinating inside-out and right-side-in study of the different selves we all have. I don’t mean selves in the sense of multiple personalities; rather I’m thinking of the way that we might turn down our weird sense of humor and tendency to swear for work or dial up our approachability for social situations. We are multi-faceted and only we know all of our own facets. Because we have Rebecca’s notebooks, we have a clearer sense of who she is—except that we have to remember that she is pushing herself to be someone she’s not to achieve a measure of closure. Braithwaite is murkier, since we only have excerpts of his writing sprinkled through the narrator’s biography. We see him from the outside. We could judge these characters by their actions, as various adages encourage us to do. However, that removes the entirety of their motivations and all of the inner turmoil these characters experience. Actions alone can’t help us really understand our characters.

I was fascinated by the way the narratives kept returning to the tension between these characters’ inner selves and the selves they present to the rest of the world. In her notebooks, Rebecca presents herself as dutiful daughter (to her father), confident sex pot (to the young man she meets before her first appointment), and adversary/patient (to Braithwaite). Braithwaite’s selves are less varied. He mostly reads like an asshole, but we know more lies beneath the surface because we know about his unhappy childhood, troubled relationship to his parents, alcoholism, and his ultimate fate. I started to develop a theory about mental health being a response to the conflict between the selves (at least in part) as I watched the characters start to spiral as they lost control of their identities.

This book was an incredibly thought-provoking book. I wish I was still in a book club so that I had people to talk with about the presentation of Rebecca and Braithwaite and about psychology and all its onion-like layers.