The Answer to the Riddle Is Me

The Answer to the Riddle Is Me

By David Stuart MacLean
Unabridged
100% overall 1 rating. Go to reviews
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“A gripping medical mystery, a heartwarming personal journey, and a chilling indictment of the commonly prescribed drug that upended MacLean’s life—but left his superb literary skills intact.”

Rebecca Skloot, New York Times bestselling author

Imagine waking up in a train station in India with no idea who you are or how you got there. This is what happened to David MacLean.

In 2002, at age twenty-eight, David MacLean woke up in a foreign land with his memory wiped clean. No money. No passport. No identity.

Taken to a mental hospital by the police, MacLean then started to hallucinate so severely he had to be tied down. Soon he could remember song lyrics and scenes from television shows but not his family, his friends, or the woman he loved. All of these symptoms, it turned out, were the result of the commonly prescribed malarial medication he was taking. Upon his return to the States, he struggled to piece together the fragments of his former life in a harrowing, absurd, and unforgettable journey back to himself.

A deeply felt, closely researched, and intensely personal book, The Answer to the Riddle Is Me, drawn from MacLean's award-winning This American Life essay, confronts and celebrates the dark, mysterious depths of our psyches and the myriad ways we are all unknowable, especially to ourselves.

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  1. Holly
    Overall Liked it
    Verified listener

    Crazy!

    Remind me never to take Malaria medication. This was a very interesting memoir, and the way the author describes his descent into Crazy Town was vivid and compelling. His hallucinations were blended in with reality and by the end you weren't even sure reality was real. The thought of waking up in a foreign country and not knowing who you are is terrifying enough, but to be plagued by hallucinations as well? Outrageous. There were a couple times I felt the pacing of the story got bogged down by explanations of what medications were and their various symptoms and how they worked, but otherwise this was a very engaging memoir. Neil Shah's narration was excellent.

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