Staff Pick
Meredith Westgate’s debut novel stood apart from the dozens of books I read in 2021 as timely and innovative. Sophie and Lucien meet at a rehabilitation center for people who are addicted to Memoroxin, an Alzheimer’s medication that allows patients to choose and encapsulate their memories and to relive them. In The Shimmering State, we experience the pain and joy, the loneliness and the friendship of these characters. Woven masterfully throughout, Westgate highlights modern society's concerns about isolation, power, drug abuse, and the unintended consequences of technological advancement. Recommended By Kim S., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Named Vogue's "Best Books to Read This Summer" ∙ The Millions "Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2021 Book Preview"
"A shimmering, dreamlike experience of multiple lives that collide and repel through fate and coincidence." — Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State
A luminous literary debut following two patients in recovery after an experimental memory drug warps their lives.
Lucien moves to Los Angeles to be with his grandmother as she undergoes an experimental memory treatment for Alzheimer's using the new drug, Memoroxin. An emerging photographer, he's also running from the sudden death of his mother, a well-known artist whose legacy haunts Lucien.
Sophie has just landed the lead in the upcoming performance of La Sylphide with the Los Angeles Ballet Company. She still waitresses at the Chateau Marmont during her off hours, witnessing the recreational use of Memoroxin — or Mem — among the Hollywood elite.
When Lucien and Sophie meet at The Center, founded by the ambitious yet conflicted Dr. Angelica Sloane to treat patients who've abused Mem, they have no memory of how they got there — or why they feel so inexplicably drawn to each other. Is it attraction, or something they cannot remember from "before"?
Set in a city that seems to have no identity of its own, The Shimmering State is a graceful meditation on the power of story and its creation. It masterfully explores memory and how it can elude us, trap us, or set us free.
Review
"Like an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for the #MeToo era, The Shimmering State is a riveting, nuanced, and ultimately haunting meditation on the triangular relationship between sense, memory, and identity. There must be something in the California air because, like Joan Didion, Meredith Westgate has an extraordinary ear, not only for the stories we tell ourselves in order to live, but for the ways that we endlessly revise them to suit the new selves we continue to construct." ADAM WILSON, author of Sensation Machines
Review
"Stirring, lush, and thought-provoking, The Shimmering State is an entrancing novel about the losses that bind us and the memories that define us." ELAN MASTAI, author of All Our Wrongs Today
Review
"Cinematic, dreamlike, at times brutal yet poignant. The premise of this new memory drug is tantalizing, and the storylines that unfold from the abuse of it are compelling." FRANCES CHA, author of If I Had Your Face
About the Author
Meredith Westgate grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. The Shimmering State is her first novel. Visit her at MeredithWestgate.com and on Instagram @MeredithWestgate.