My Happy Retreat: A Novel

My Happy Retreat: A Novel is the story of Me, a woman recently retired and in her early sixties, caught up as the third person in the lives of a well-educated, well-traveled, semi-retired couple, owners of a sugar cane plantation on a Caribbean island, and how she came to be swept up in-or allowed herself to be swept up in depending on your views about locus of control-the gradual slipping away of the wife's grip on reality. The chronological ages of the narrator and the couple with whom she became involved span only a decade, but their mental states during the course of their association grew to be light years apart. The cold revelation here is that any one of us who reaches this stage of our lives at any time may start losing touch with the world of forms and end up responding to the world of ideas that exist inside our heads. When that happens, the problem will no longer be a case of merely forgetting where we placed the keys to the car, but of losing the ability to articulate or to even comprehend what exactly is the purpose for which the car is used. ---Excerpted from the Foreword by Dr. Bridget Peterson, M.D.