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Did an Unorthodox Therapist Drive a Woman to Suicide?

“Case Study,” by Graeme Macrae Burnet, is a novel of found documents detailing troubled lives and shifting identities.

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CASE STUDY, by Graeme Macrae Burnet

To get to Primrose Hill from central London, you take the Tube to Chalk Farm Station, exit to your right toward a cafe and an off-license, and climb a path to an overpass above train tracks. The path is called, rather unassumingly, Bridge Approach, and a five-minute walk leads to Primrose Hill. I happened to live in these parts for three years, and I crossed the overpass twice a day most days. Just to the south is the Pembroke Castle pub, where Liam Gallagher of Oasis was once arrested, in 1998. Another neighborhood tippler, Kingsley Amis, favored the Queen’s at the corner of St. George’s Terrace, according to his biographer Zachary Leader, who printed his monthly tab. From my balcony I could see the phone box where Sylvia Plath would desperately call Ted Hughes at his lover’s flat in her last days. It is a quiet neighborhood, but one dense with intrigue and peopled by famous, messy and tortured artistic personages.

The events of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s fourth novel, “Case Study,” are set off by a suicide in the 1960s by a young woman named Veronica, who jumps from the Bridge Approach overpass and is struck by the 4:45 train to High Barnet. (I am not sure that High Barnet trains, rather than Edgware-bound ones, run on this track, nor that the overpass itself, rather than just the path that approaches it, is called Bridge Approach, but these are the sorts of possible slight inaccuracies that Burnet and his not entirely reliable narrators relish.) An investigation into Veronica’s death and the man who might have been responsible for it — her therapist, Arthur Collins Braithwaite, whose office is on Primrose Hill — forms the substance of the narrative. Like Burnet’s previous novel, “ His Bloody Project ” (2016), “Case Study” was nominated for the Booker Prize and consists largely of purportedly found documents.

The would-be Miss Marple of Burnet’s loopy detective story is Veronica’s unnamed younger sister, who, under the alias Rebecca Smyth, becomes Braithwaite’s patient to find out if he drove Veronica to take her own life. Rebecca details her five sessions in notebooks that decades later end up in the hands of a writer named GMB, our frame narrator, who is researching Braithwaite for a potential biography. Now cast into obscurity, the (fictional) therapist was once a figure of note, appearing on BBC chat shows and publishing the books “Untherapy,” a best seller, and “Kill Your Self,” which Rebecca calls “a jumble of incomprehensible sentences, each having no discernible relationship to its neighbors.” Still, we are told by GMB, “Kill Your Self” “captured the zeitgeist,” acquired for its author a cult following from which he drew a lucrative pool of patients, and “if anything, the impenetrability of certain passages only served to confirm the author’s genius.”

“Case Study” consists of a preface, in which GMB explains how he received the notebooks (from Rebecca’s cousin, who noticed a blog post by GMB on Braithwaite); the five notebooks themselves, one of which includes a chapter clipped from “Untherapy” about a patient who is clearly Veronica; five biographical chapters about Braithwaite by GMB, inserted between the notebooks; and a postscript, in which GMB ventures south to pay a visit to the Pembroke Castle. The elegant nested structure is one of the novel’s chief appeals. So is the contrast between Rebecca’s narrative voice, characterized by what GMB calls “a certain kooky élan,” and the cool tone of GMB’s Life of Braithwaite. What emerges is a comedy of identities tried on and discarded. Given the number of suicides that mark the story, it’s a comedy with dark underpinnings.

Rebecca lives with her father, a retired engineer, and their housekeeper, and works as a receptionist for a talent agent. Her mother died when she was 15, falling off a cliff before her eyes, during a family holiday in Devon. Given that Rebecca is the only witness to the fall, and that she admits to fantasizing about pushing someone off the cliff the sentence before recounting her mother’s death, we can’t help suspecting that she might have done it herself. But we have no more reason to doubt it than the rest of her story, and that’s part of the fun: The whole tale might be a hoax.

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by Graeme Macrae Burnet ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2022

A brisk and engaging novel that wears itself thin on the grindstone of its own conceit.

A provocative send-up of midcentury British mores and the roots of modern psychotherapy.

Toward the end of 2019, GMB, a character with the author's initials, receives an email from one Martin Grey, who has in his possession several notebooks he believes GMB might find of interest. Mr. Grey asserts that the notebooks were written by his cousin about Collins Braithwaite, the notorious and now largely forgotten “ enfant terrible of the so-called anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s,” on whom GMB has recently published a blog post. According to Grey, the notebooks contain evidence of near-criminal misconduct concerning Braithwaite’s involvement in the suicide of the diarist’s older sister, Veronica. GMB’s research assures him of the notebooks’ authenticity, if not their veracity, and he presents their contents verbatim, interspersed with sections of his own outline of Braithwaite’s salacious life and ignoble death. From the plinth of this metatextual introduction, the book dives into the “kooky élan” of a thoroughly middle-class young woman—the diarist—as she infiltrates Braithwaite’s office under the nom de guerre Rebecca Smyth. Rebecca is bent on uncovering the truth about Braithwaite’s therapeutic practice though she’s unsure what purpose this truth would serve. However, over the course of the five notebooks, Rebecca’s rapid descent into true depression coupled with her increasing difficulty in keeping her original identity separate from her assumed self become the driving narrative. As the novel progresses, the author’s layering of his fictional characters’ unverifiable testimony, frank deception, and self-aggrandizing half-truths with significant historical figures of the time—like R.D. Laing and Dirk Bogarde—and GMB's omnipresent frame narrative overlap to the extent that it's hard to tell not just whose perception to trust, but which among all these counterfeit identities is real. As beguiling as Rebecca’s wry domestic critique can be, the book’s star is clearly the carefully constructed unreliability Burnet imbues at every level of his writing. This results in a novel that strives toward the biggest of questions—in the absence of the Cartesian ego Braithwaite seeks to slay, is there anything at all underneath our masks?—but lacks the character-driven empathy that would encourage us to care about the answer.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-77196-520-0

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Biblioasis

Review Posted Online: July 25, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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IT STARTS WITH US

by Colleen Hoover ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2022

Through palpable tension balanced with glimmers of hope, Hoover beautifully captures the heartbreak and joy of starting over.

The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother.

Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop; her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily won’t send Emerson to her father’s house overnight until she’s old enough to talk—“So she can tell me if something happens”—but she doesn’t want to fight for full custody lest it become an expensive legal drama or, worse, a physical fight. When Lily runs into Atlas Corrigan, a childhood friend who also came from an abusive family, she hopes their friendship can blossom into love. (For new readers, their history unfolds in heartfelt diary entries that Lily addresses to Finding Nemo star Ellen DeGeneres as she considers how Atlas was a calming presence during her turbulent childhood.) Atlas, who is single and running a restaurant, feels the same way. But even though she’s divorced, Lily isn’t exactly free. Behind Ryle’s veneer of civility are his jealousy and resentment. Lily has to plan her dates carefully to avoid a confrontation. Meanwhile, Atlas’ mother returns with shocking news. In between, Lily and Atlas steal away for romantic moments that are even sweeter for their authenticity as Lily struggles with child care, breastfeeding, and running a business while trying to find time for herself.

Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-668-00122-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022

ROMANCE | CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | GENERAL FICTION

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by Colleen Hoover

SEEN & HEARD

BY ANY OTHER NAME

by Jodi Picoult ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2024

A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.

Who was Shakespeare?

Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name , “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.

Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024

ISBN: 9780593497210

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Jodi Picoult & Jennifer Finney Boylan

by Jodi Picoult

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Book review: Case Study, by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Graeme Macrae Burnet is a master of the false but apparently authentic document. There are five lengthy ones in this, his fourth novel, intercut by a likewise credibly invented biographical sketch of a briefly famous, or rather notorious, psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, “a contemporary of RD Laing, and something of an ‘enfant terrible’ of the so-called anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s.” Braithwaite’s historical authenticity is filled out not only by notes of his jealousy of Laing, and Laing’s contempt for him, but by mention of his relationships with other celebrities of the time. It is very well done, and it is tempting to believe that the dreadful and dangerous shrink really existed.

The unnamed author (ie. Macrae Burnet), having written something about Braithwaite, is sent a package of five notebooks which “contained certain allegations about Braithwaite which [the sender] is sure would interest him.”

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The notebooks are written by a young woman whose elder sister, Veronica, a brilliant Cambridge academic, committed suicide by throwing herself off a bridge. After reading a case study in Braithwaite’s book Untherapy, the writer of the notebooks is sure that the patient described is Veronica, and, having read its successor Kill Your Self, is also convinced that Braithwaite was responsible for Veronica’s death. She resolves to investigate, being all the more determined because she has been the rather dim, unconsidered younger sister, while Veronica was Daddy’s girl.

Naturally she can’t make an appointment under her own name with Dr Braithwaite; it would arouse suspicion. So she calls herself Rebecca Smyth, and Rebecca proves to be very different from her own timid self. Rebecca is clever, striking and eager for the experience that the narrator’s hitherto shy and unambitious self has shunned. Will she take over? I was reminded of the ventriloquist’s malignant dummy in that 1945 classic film Dead of Night.

Meanwhile, the unnamed author follows the course of Braithwaite’s headlong career, one that is both destructive of others and of himself, as he presents himself as the hard, working-class Northern Boy who has cast off all inhibitions as he pursues his self-appointed “mission to bring down the jerry-built edifice of psychiatry.” But, one finds oneself wondering: is Braithwaite in his arrogance and jealously as much of a phoney construct as that which he discerns in his clients? Is he wicked or merely stupidly careless in his approach to others? Do they indeed exist for him?

This is a novel which, like Macrae Burnet’s previous ones, holds the attention, develops an insidious narrative interest, and poses questions about the nature of the self and the authenticity of identity. There is comedy here too. Indeed, depending on the angle of view, Braithwaite is a comic character, if also a disturbing one. Certainly in his depiction of him, Macrae Burnet catches the self-satisfied idiocy of one strand of 1960s culture. Indeed, he is done so well and seems so authentic in his inauthenticity that you might be surprised to find no mention of him in the index of John Clay’s admirable biography of Ronnie Laing.

For the most part, though Macrae Burnet finds different voices for the writer of the notebooks and the unnamed author of the biographical Braithwaite chapters, his style is plain, lucid, very readable and rich in irony. There are fine comic passages, for instance the notebook writer’s visit to a pub with a young man who has been attracted by her assumed self, Rebecca, who insists that she should ask for gin as the non-Rebecca never would. But it is the appalling and yet ultimately rather pathetic Braithwaite who gives the book its momentum, and it is through him that the tone and temper of the times are captured. As in his other novels, Macrae Burnet writes with an admirable lucidity, at the same time being able to probe and shed light on the dark places of the mind. Writing in a prose that is spare, deadpan and yet alive, he poses questions about the nature and perception of what we choose to call reality. He is an uncommonly interesting and satisfying novelist.

Case Study, by Graeme Macrae Burnet, Saraband, 276pp, £14.99

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Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet

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B+ : very fine writing; enjoyably spun tale

See our review for fuller assessment.

   From the Reviews : "Graeme Macrae Burnet’s barnstorming psychodrama, which successfully fuses mystery, comedy and a meditation on the nebulous nature of identity. (...) The musty north London milieu, with its chintzy tea rooms, cold park benches and sticky pubs, is brilliantly evoked. (...) Burnet’s greatest achievement, however, is making you care about a woman whose name you do not know, a doctor you don’t want to know and a story you can’t trust. Consistently inventive, caustically funny and surprisingly moving, this is one of the finest novels of the year." - Christian House, Financial Times "The painstakingly assembled, predominantly mimetic fiction of the 19th century has trained us to trust the author; Burnet has always delighted in undermining such easy assumptions, and in Case Study he ups the stakes still further, providing a veritable layer cake of possible realities to get lost in. (...) If Burnet’s aim in writing Case Study was to force us up against the contradictions of our conflicted selves, he has surely succeeded. This is a novel that is entertaining and mindfully engrossing in equal measure." - Nina Allan, The Guardian " Case Study has a lot in common with the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Roberto Bolaño, in which invented characters pass through tumultuous episodes of literary history that never quite happened, though it seems as if they should have. (...) Case Study is a diverting novel, overflowing with clever plays on and inversions of tropes of English intellectual and social life during the postwar decades. As such, it is not exactly an excursion into undiscovered literary terrain. Reading Burnet’s doubly mediated metafiction of North London neurotics and decadents, I often longed to turn back to the shelf for the real thing: fictions by Doris Lessing, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Muriel Spark, Jenny Diski, Julian Barnes, Alan Hollinghurst, Zadie Smith or Rachel Cusk; biographies of Plath and Hughes; films of kitchen-sink realism starring Bogarde and Laurence Harvey, with scripts by Harold Pinter; or even the documentaries of Adam Curtis, in which Laing often makes a cameo." - Christian Lorentzen, The New York Times Book Review "It’s a book that is enormous fun to read, a mystery and a psychological drama wrapped up in one. Buoyed by the evident pleasure Macrae Burnet takes in spinning such a tightly knit tale -- the author’s note at the end is magnificent -- Case Study is a triumph" - Alex Preston, The Observer "The notebooks are interspersed with a biography of Braithwaite by Burnet, who tells us he has studied his books. Both strands quickly become compelling. (...) I was hooked like a fish." - Leyla Sanai, The Spectator "(T)ortuous, cunning and highly self-conscious (.....) Readers who equate self-referentiality with intellectual integrity, or who simply enjoy being toyed with, are in for a treat. (...) What is so clever about Burnet’s novel, and the source of much of its humour, is the introduction into this permissive environment of Rebecca, the mousey homebody who ends up outwitting the so-called genius. (...) Ultimately, what the author wants to show us is that, by pulling us into his tale, he can leave ink on our hands too." - Kate Webb, Times Literary Supplement Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

Writing something down invests it with a kind of significance, but in general things are of such little consequence, even to those involved, that the act of recording them is no more than vanity.

My diary, however, was a work of fiction. I constructed a character, much as any novelist would do, and all for the benefit of a single reader. It is not that what I wrote was untrue. At least as far as I can recall, these things did actually happen. It's just that, taken together, they create a false impression. The real truth lay not in what I wrote, but in what I omitted.

     The thing is, petal, it doesn't actually matter to me whether any of it actually happened. What matters is that this was the story you chose to tell.

Braithwaite takes as his starting point the idea that if one is going to talk about the self, one should begin by defining what one means. He quickly descends, however, into claiming that defining the self at all is a fraudulent act: the Self does not exist as an entity or a thing; if it exists at all, it is no more than a projection of the self (the book is full ofsuch paradoxes).

Everything you do is concealment. And it's not that you're concealing something from me. You're concealing it from yourself. You're buried under a landslide of fakery. The way you dress is fake. The way you speak is fake. Even the way you hold your cigarette is fake. You're a phoney.

Ever since I took up the habit, I have loved smoking more than anything. Smoking is a veil.

She leapt off and he had been left holding nothing but her shoe. That shoe, along with her other clothing and the contents of her handbag, were later returned to us. The second shoe was never recovered, but as her feet were two sizes larger than mine, I could not in any case have worn them.

All the needlepoint and pianoforte in the world cannot alter the fact that for most of us quiet despair is the best we can hope for.

- M.A.Orthofer , 11 September 2022

About the Author :

       Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet was born in 1967.

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Graeme Macrae Burnet Biblioasis ( Nov 1, 2022 ) Softcover $18.95 ( 288pp ) 978-1-77196-520-0

A psychology enthusiast dives into writings by and about his favorite psychologist in Graeme Macrae Burnet’s literary novel Case Study .

Upon discovering that her sister had been seeing rogue psychologist Collins Braithwaite before committing suicide, a young woman, known as “Rebecca,” sets out to prove that he drove her sister to despair and is, therefore, a murderer. Her efforts consist of several sessions with Braithwaite where she spins yarns based on actual experiences, delving into her deepest secrets. She records these in her notebooks, which find their way to a distant cousin, who, in turn, passes them along to an author, initials GMB, with a known interest in all things Braithwaite.

The fictional author and Burnet share the same initials, which should be a clue as to how close the book will come to breaking the fourth wall. It is a small detail, overlooked and forgotten as the recollections within the notebooks unfold. Until the narrative changes. The chapters alternate between Rebecca’s notebooks and a biography of Braithwaite, following him from childhood through his dissolute adulthood. Rebecca’s personal explorations of her innermost thoughts and suppressed experiences, spurred by her conversations with Braithwaite, contrast with Braithwaite’s depersonalized biography. Even so, they are complementary, one offering insight into the other.

Braithwaite’s biographical information is detailed, including the moment he developed an interest in psychology and his therapeutic approach. Of particular interest is his writing career, which is where Rebecca begins her research and comes to her initial conclusion. The meticulous attention to the contents of Braithwaite’s books calls their actual existence into question. The matryoshka-style layering of narratives, each dependent on the other, is engaging and disorienting.

Case Study is an immersive novel that stretches its fiction to fact-like proportions.

Reviewed by Dontaná McPherson-Joseph November / December 2022

Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

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Written by Graeme Macrae Burnet Review by Jessica Brockmole

An author researching a notorious and now-forgotten British psychotherapist unexpectedly receives a series of notebooks written by a former patient. Thus begins Graeme Macrae Burnet’s metafictional novel, presented as the footnoted second edition of a biography written by the slyly named G.M.B. The unnamed writer of the notebooks is a young London woman looking for explanations two years after her sister’s suicide in 1963. Blaming the unconventional psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite for her sister’s death, she goes undercover as a patient named Rebecca Smyth. She worries that she looks too neat and collected to be “a nut,” but through her sessions with Braithwaite, “Rebecca” becomes less and less certain of that, as her real self and her undercover self vie for control. The five notebooks alternate with G.M.B.’s detailed biographical chapters on the forgotten—and, it should be said, wholly fictional—Collins Braithwaite.

Case Study is a dizzying dive into British counterculture of the 1960s and the radical anti-psychiatry movement. This short novel is wildly inventive and slickly written. The notebooks feel so casually and authentically from the period, with “Rebecca’s” word choices and the details she includes saying as much about 1960s British society as they do about her place in it. “Rebecca” is deliciously unreliable as a narrator and seems as constructed as her undercover persona, leaving the reader to wonder at the honesty in either her initial self-assuredness or her later descent into instability. Through both “Rebecca’s” notebooks and G.M.B.’s biography, Braithwaite comes across as arrogant, dismissive, manipulative, but also undeniably magnetic and brilliant. I must stress the “fictional” again, as Burnet writes so convincingly that I found myself looking up Braithwaite, more than once, sure that I had just failed to find him in the last search. An excellent and imaginative novel, well deserving of its place on the Booker Prize longlist.

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The Line Between the Original and the Imposter in “Case Study”

“Who is to say which is the original and which is the imposter?” queries Graeme Macrae Burnet in his 2022 Booker-Prize-nominated novel, Case Study . The question is applicable to a character in the novel, to documents reproduced within the novel and, most intriguing, to the author himself.

Burnet is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and Case Study serves as a worthy addition to his oeuvre; however, defining that oeuvre is a challenge.

His 2015 novel, His Bloody Project , brought his work to an international readership with its Booker-Prize shortlisting. Burnet researched His Bloody Project at the Highland Archive Centre in Inverness, Scotland; inspired by a prisoner’s 1869 memoir, Burnet presents articles, police and witness statements, post-mortem reports, and excerpts from a memoir by a man who interviewed Macrae (the prisoner’s patronym). Burnet invites readers to examine “discrepancies, contradictions and omissions” in the archival documents, but international readers depend exclusively on Burnet’s book to assemble an understanding of the crime.

His Bloody Project inserts itself into the tradition of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) and Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites (2013). Such novels explore questions of interpretation via events in the historical record: central characters are accused of violent crimes against higher-status individuals, whose stories are prioritized because of their socio-economic privilege. In contrast, Burnet credibly presents documentation—all of which he has invented—with enough nuance and detail to position His Bloody Project as historical true crime.

But before all of that, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s name appeared on the 2014 novel The Disappearance of Adèle Bardeau, as the translator. In the foreword, Burnet marvels that Raymond Brunet’s cult classic hasn’t previously been translated into English; it’s been “almost continuously” in print since 1982 in France, buoyed by the subsequent film’s success. In the afterword, Burnet examines the alignment between various events and characters in Raymond Brunet’s novel and specific biographical details and prominent figures in the French author’s life. Burnet notes that Raymond Brunet died troubled and alone, having struggled to accept the film—“It was not a fictional character he was watching on screen, but a projection of himself.”

Raymond Brunet’s mother apparently outlived him, and after her death, a litigation firm dispatched an envelope containing a manuscript titled The Accident on the A35 . Burnet’s foreword to this 2017 novel describes how amused and guilty the author’s solicitor felt, actually possessing the second manuscript after the author’s death, amidst rumors of its existence. Burnet’s afterword provides additional intersections between fact and fiction in Raymond Brunet’s second novel. “So the premise and central characters of the novel were clearly rooted in reality, but what of the narrative?” Burnet asks, before explaining how one of the novel’s plotlines is seemingly drawn from the life of the man who directed the film based on Raymond Brunet’s first novel.

In the first of these translations, Burnet’s supplementary material spirals around a quotation from Georges Simenon’s autobiographical novel Pedigree : “Everything is true while nothing is accurate.” In Burnet’s commentary on Raymond Brunet’s posthumously published work, he draws attention to this passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Words : “What I have just written is false. True. Neither true nor false.” It’s more important for all of this to be believable than for it to be true, and Burnet creates a framework in which readers can believe, using his “expertise” on an imagined novelist (Raymond Brunet) to increase readers’ trust in Burnet. Despite positioning this duology in reality, however, Raymond Brunet is a fictional author.

But what of the author’s responsibility? In His Bloody Project ’s “Historical Notes,” Burnet indicates “any inaccuracies, whether by design or error, are entirely my own responsibility”. In Case Study ’s acknowledgements, Burnet accepts responsibility for a portion of the work, but “any inaccuracies” from the excerpted notebooks are that author’s responsibility. As Burnet’s fictions increase in complexity, he appears to distance himself further from his creative work.

Where Are All The Novels About Online Sex Work? Masking for a Friend

In Case Study , Burnet presents two additional authors, whose documents are made available to readers. Most compelling are the private notebooks of a woman who is preoccupied by a young woman’s suicide; she believes that she has recognised the dead woman in a psychotherapist’s published work, despite that author’s having concealed the woman’s true identity. The author of the notebooks presents evidence of the psychotherapist’s misconduct and excerpts his publications; this complex structure allows questions about selfhood and identity, confusion and delusion, to proliferate. 

Case Study is not a unique narrative; novels as diverse as Jesse Ball’s Silence Once Begun , Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke , and Kwon Yeo-Sun’s Lemon (translated by Janet Hong) require that readers construct their own understandings, based on incomplete or conflicting accounts, of tragic events.Graeme Macrae Burnet stands apart, however. He not only presents different iterations of narratives, but different versions of authorship. Like a character in Case Study , Burnet has “a flexible relationship with the truth.” In translation? Not one word he writes is true.

FICTION Case Study By Graeme Macrae Burnet Biblioasis Published on November 1, 2022

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Add your guide, you are here:, case histories.

Kate Atkinson's marvelous first novel, BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM, distinguished her as a gifted storyteller and a novelist to watch. Now, with her fourth work of fiction, CASE HISTORIES, Atkinson proves her mettle with a thoroughly engaging novel that is part thriller, part psychological study, and part consideration of the mysteries of fate.

The novel opens with three "case histories." First come the Lands, the four daughters of a remote, unlikable Cambridge math professor. The youngest, Olivia, is universally beloved. When she disappears from a tent during a backyard slumber party, none of the Land sisters will ever be the same.

The second case is that of Theo Wyre, a Cambridge solicitor who dotes on his younger daughter, Laura. He worries about her constantly: "He worried when she went out in a high wind that a piece of falling masonry might drop on her head, he worried that she would take a student flat with an unserviced water heater and die of carbon monoxide poisoning." That's why, when Laura takes a job in Theo's office during the summer before she is to start college, he's glad that he'll be able to keep an eye on her. Little does he know that what he imagines as the safest place for Laura will prove deadly.

Finally, we have the case of Michelle Fletcher, a young mother who feels trapped by her marriage and her baby: "she hadn't 'bonded' with the baby, instead she was shackled by it." Isolated and lonely, Michelle snaps when her husband makes the mistake of waking the baby up from a nap.

Some of these cases are more than thirty years old; others happened recently. Into the middle comes private detective Jackson Brodie, who, in the course of a few weeks, shifts from investigating adulterous wives and missing cats to pondering cases that the police had abandoned years ago. Jackson is having a personal crisis of his own, and he ends up getting personally and emotionally involved with too many of his clients.

As the story unfolds gradually, shifting perspectives and timelines expose connections that no one had anticipated. Careful readers will delight in these revelations (one character reveals her identity by using a particularly odd metaphor, for example). All along, the careful plotting of Atkinson's story and the loveliness of her language make for a novel that is as thrilling as any mystery but has depth beyond most other thrillers.

Reviewed by Norah Piehl on January 7, 2011

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

• Publication Date: October 17, 2005
• Genres: Fiction
• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• ISBN-10: 0316010707
• ISBN-13: 9780316010702

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The Case Study Handbook, Revised Edition: A Student's Guide Revised Edition

The guide all MBAs and exec ed students need.

If you're enrolled in an MBA or executive education program, you've probably encountered a powerful learning tool: the business case. But if you're like many people, you may find interpreting and writing about cases mystifying and time-consuming. In The Case Study Handbook, Revised Edition , William Ellet presents a potent new approach for efficiently analyzing, discussing, and writing about cases. Early chapters show how to classify cases according to the analytical task they require (making a decision, performing an evaluation, or diagnosing a problem) and quickly establish a base of knowledge about a case. Strategies and templates, in addition to several sample Harvard Business School cases, help you apply the author's framework. Later in the book, Ellet shows how to write persuasive case-analytical essays based on the process laid out earlier. Examples of effective writing further reinforce the methods. The book also includes a chapter on how to talk about cases more effectively in class. Any current or prospective MBA or executive education student needs this guide.

• ISBN-10 9781633696150
• ISBN-13 978-1633696150
• Edition Revised
• Publisher Harvard Business Review Press
• Publication date September 18, 2018
• Language English
• Dimensions 7 x 0.5 x 9 inches
• Print length 272 pages
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1633696154
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvard Business Review Press; Revised edition (September 18, 2018)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781633696150
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1633696150
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.5 x 9 inches
• #131 in Running Meetings & Presentations (Books)
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Case Study: A Novel Summary Graeme MaCrae Burnet

Everything you need to understand or teach Case Study by Graeme MaCrae Burnet.

• Case Study: A Novel Summary & Study Guide

Case Study: A Novel Overview

In Graeme Macrae Burnet's novel Case Study , after the unnamed narrator reads infamous psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite's book  Untherapy , she becomes convinced he is responsible for her sister's suicide. In an attempt to divine the truth of his malpractice, she dons the persona of Rebecca Smyth, a character she has invented to infiltrate Braithwaite's offices. Over the course of her sessions with Braithwaite, however, the narrator finds herself increasingly unsure of who she is and what she wants. Burnet uses sharp, ironic humor and a subversive meta-narrative structure in order to explore themes including identity, entrapment, and autonomy. 

Case Study Study Guide

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