Confessions of Madame Psyche by Dorothy Bryant

Okay, quick plot synopsis: Madame Psyche is Mei-Li Murrow, a half-Chinese little girl who begins her career as a spirit medium in San Fransisco, just before the great earthquake of 1906. What starts as a childish prank becomes a succesful, albeit fraudulent, career which gets her fame and a fine reputation on two continents. Mei-Lei meanwhile searches for the meaning in life, just as her own clients do. Unlike them, however, she feels alone and unaided (and also a bit of a schmuck for offering people false comfort). Life is hard and then you die, pretty much sums up what happens in Confessions. Madame Psyche a.k.a. Mei-Li a.k.a. Lee a.k.a May endures many hardships and losses: during WWI in England; later in continental Europe with an opera troupe; back to California to found a utopian-style community in the Redwood Forest; then as a humble worker in fruit orchards and canneries. Finally Mei-Li is committed into the Napa Valley asylum for the insane, where she ends her days. Cheerful, huh? Well its not actually as depressing as it sounds, because like any true seeker of spiritual life, Mei-Li needs to shed all the trappings of worldly success in order to find peace and happiness. As Mei-Li herself writes about the myth of Psyche, her adopted namesake:

"All the earlier endings were beginnings. All Psyche's mistakes were doors opening. All her punishments were tests that transformed her and the gods as well. 'All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses/And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.' That's from part of a poem Erika recited at my mother's funeral."

What I especially liked about this story was Bryant's use of the memoir format. She does this so coonvincingly, that I kept re-checking the cover of the book, for the bit where it claims it's a novel. Bryant writes an author's preface which explains her "discovery" of Mei-Li's original manuscript, luckily survived and fallen into the hands of Mei-Li's daughter, long believed by Mei-Li to be dead. Then the memoir itself follows and seems to interact so intimately with historical persons, events and locales that you have to keep squinting at the book's cover, not sure what to believe - Dorothy Bryant must do her research. To complete the mirage, old photos are even inserted, ostensibly depicting the heroine's relatives and the places she lived. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I LOVE work that mixes historical fact and artistic fancy. So thanks loads Dorothy Bryant for playing with my mind. They say truth is stranger than fiction but fiction tells the truth better. To my taste it's a fuzzy muddling of both that is the most delicious. --RR

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