Writing THE LOBOTOMIST’S WIFE: A Braid of Facts and Imagination

Writing is my second act. Almost a decade ago, after I gave up my full-time corporate job to take care of my two young children, I found myself searching for something “of my own” outside of the home. I’ve always liked to write but hadn’t considered a novel until I took a beginner novel workshop at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence. I started writing a contemporary novel about a suburban housewife dissatisfied with her “charmed” life. It wasn’t great. 

At about two years and 200 pages into my writing (and now in an intermediate novel class!) I had an epiphany. I was listening to Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and The Heroes Who Faught Them by Jennifer Wright and she included a chapter on lobotomy and Walter Freeman II (1895 –1972,) the doctor who popularized the procedure in the United States. I had a vague notion of what lobotomy was, but no idea that the heyday of this gruesome treatment was in the middle of the 20th century. Or that, by the early 1950s, Freeman was prescribing his out-patient “ice pick” technique for everything from migraines to depression, and more than half of his private patients were women. 

Suddenly, it hit me: what if my unhappy housewife lived in the early 1950s instead of today, when lobotomy was a feasible “solution” for her misery? 

The Lobotomist’s Wife was born.