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The Answer to the Riddle Is Me
- A Memoir of Amnesia
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
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Publisher's summary
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 28, 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 hisreturn 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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Story
From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, 24-year-old Koren Zailckas leads us through her experience of a terrifying trend among young girls, exploring how binge drinking becomes routine, how it becomes "the usual". With the stylistic freshness of a poet and the dramatic gifts of a novelist, Zailckas describes her first sip at 14, alcohol poisoning at 16, blacked-out sexual experience at 19, and total disorientation after waking up in an unfamiliar New York City apartment at 22.
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Smashed
- By John Riggs on 07-14-05
By: Koren Zailckas
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The UnAmericans
- Stories
- By: Molly Antopol
- Narrated by: Jennifer Van Dyck
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Again and again, Molly Antopol’s deeply sympathetic characters struggle for footing in an uncertain world, hounded by forces beyond their control. Their voices are intimate and powerful and they resonate with searing beauty. Antopol is a superb young talent, and The UnAmericans will long be remembered for its wit, humanity, and heart.
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Sensational stories! Brilliant new author.
- By MidwestGeek on 05-04-14
By: Molly Antopol
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I'll Be There
- By: Holly Goldberg Sloan
- Narrated by: Laura Jennings
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Emily Bell believes in destiny. To her, being forced to sing a solo in the church choir - despite her average voice - is fate: because it's while she's singing that she first sees Sam. At first sight they are connected. Sam Border wishes he could escape, but there's nowhere for him to run. He and his little brother, Riddle, have spent their entire lives constantly uprooted by their unstable father. As Sam and Riddle are welcomed into the Bells' lives, they witness the warmth and protection of a family for the first time.
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Needs to be a film!
- By TreasureHunter on 06-25-16
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The Silent History
- By: Eli Horowitz, Matthew Derby, Kevin Moffett
- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman, LJ Ganser
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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It begins as a statistical oddity: a spike in children born with acute speech delays. Physically normal in every way, these children never speak and do not respond to speech; they don't learn to read, don't learn to write. As the number of cases grows to an epidemic level, theories spread. Maybe it's related to a popular antidepressant; maybe it's environmental. Or maybe these children have special skills all their own.
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A Thought-Provoking Premise
- By Doug - Audible on 03-31-15
By: Eli Horowitz, and others
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Chanel Bonfire
- By: Wendy Lawless
- Narrated by: Wendy Lawless
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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By the time Wendy Lawless turned 17, she'd known for quite some time that she didn't have a normal mother. But that didn't stop her from wanting one.... Georgann Rea didn't bake cookies or go to PTA meetings; she wore a mink coat and always had a lit Dunhill plugged into her cigarette holder. She went through men like Kleenex, and didn't like dogs or children. Georgann had the ice queen beauty of a Hitchcock heroine and the cold heart to match.
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Not an Engaging Listen
- By Sobriquet on 03-13-13
By: Wendy Lawless
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The Opposite of Loneliness
- Essays and Stories
- By: Marina Keegan
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. Even though she was just 22 when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation.
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Probably buy the book too.
- By Soupergirl on 09-14-15
By: Marina Keegan
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Marrow
- By: Tarryn Fisher
- Narrated by: Audra Pagano
- Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Margo is not like other girls. She lives in a derelict neighborhood called the Bone, in a cursed house, with her cursed mother, who hasn't spoken to her in over two years. She lives her days feeling invisible. It's not until she develops a friendship with her wheelchair-bound neighbor, Judah Grant, that things begin to change. When a neighborhood girl, seven-year-old Neveah Anthony, goes missing, Judah sets out to help Margo uncover what happened to her. What Margo finds changes her, and with a new perspective on life she's determined to find evil and punish it.
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HUH?? I'm so confused LOL
- By ❤️Cyndi Marie❤️🎧Audiobook Addicts🎧 on 09-15-16
By: Tarryn Fisher
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The Golden State
- A Novel
- By: Lydia Kiesling
- Narrated by: Amanda Dolan
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In Lydia Kiesling's razor-sharp debut novel, The Golden State, we accompany Daphne, a young mother on the edge of a breakdown, as she flees her sensible but strained life in San Francisco for the high desert of Altavista with her toddler Honey. Bucking under the weight of being a single parent - her Turkish husband is unable to return to the United States because of a "processing error" - Daphne takes refuge in a mobile home left to her by her grandparents in hopes that the quiet will bring clarity.
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Tedious read but delightful reader Amanda Dolan
- By Eric on 02-14-19
By: Lydia Kiesling
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Man Alive
- A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man
- By: Thomas Page McBee
- Narrated by: Thomas Page McBee
- Length: 3 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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What does it really mean to be a man? In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life - one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past and freed him to become the man he was meant to be.
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Worth a listen
- By Kade on 05-30-18
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Darling Days
- A Memoir
- By: iO Tillett Wright
- Narrated by: iO Tillett Wright
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Born into the beautiful bedlam of downtown New York in the eighties, iO Tillett Wright came of age at the intersection of punk, poverty, heroin, and art. This was a world of self-invented characters, glamorous superstars, and strung-out sufferers, ground zero of drag and performance art. Still, no personality was more vibrant and formidable than iO's mother's. Rhonna, a showgirl and young widow, was a mercurial, erratic glamazon. She was iO's fiercest defender and only authority in a world with few boundaries and even fewer indicators of normal life.
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Can’t wait for more from this Author!
- By Team Hobson on 07-24-19
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Fairyland
- A Memoir of My Father
- By: Alysia Abbott
- Narrated by: Alysia Abbott
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and 80s San Francisco with an openly gay father. After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation - few of whom are raising a child. Steve throws himself into San Francisco's vibrant cultural scene.
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Great representation of the time
- By AvidReader22 on 06-07-19
By: Alysia Abbott
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Make Your Home Among Strangers
- By: Jennine Capó Crucet
- Narrated by: Marisol Ramirez
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Lizet, a daughter of Cuban immigrants and the first in her family to graduate from high school, secretly applies and is accepted to an ultra-elite college. Her parents are furious at her decision to leave Miami, and amid a painful divorce, her father sells her childhood home, leaving Lizet, her mother, and older sister, a newly single mom, without a steady income and scrambling for a place to live.
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Tremendous Insight on 1st Gen College Students
- By RelizzScholar27 on 11-16-19
What listeners say about The Answer to the Riddle Is Me
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ledood
- 08-26-15
very good listen
i forget what i was going to write here, oh well . . . .
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2 people found this helpful
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- Andrea Gold
- 09-03-22
Exceptional writing
I really enjoyed this. Loved how the author chose to unravel his story, you are in the thick of it with him, learning as he learns. Would highly recommend. Well done.
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- Laura
- 08-02-23
feeling lost and found again
discovered this book via the Drifter's Sympathy podcast - listened straight through start to finish!
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- Bric
- 08-12-19
This is an amzing story
This had me shocked from start to finish. The idea that this can happen to someone is very eye opening. Especially seeing how the situation all played out. I highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone that is looking for a great story. This is one of the greats real life you will never believe it type stories. Defiantly check it out.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Wade Baker
- 01-05-24
terrifying
I have serious trouble with my memory as well, but this poor guy. to find yourself standing at a train station in India, and suddenly realize, you're white, this is not your country, and you have zero memory of anything at all except English? no passport, no wallet, no idea what your own name is? who are your parents, are you a husband, or father, what year is it? All over a medicine to fight off malaria, just in case you're bitten by a mosquito. and the damage is permanent.
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- Adam B
- 07-26-21
Absolutely fantastic
Beautifully written and wonderfully narrated. The story is, by turns, astonishing, beautiful, heartbreaking, and rather terrifying. One of the best reads I’ve had in years. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time.
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1 person found this helpful
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- all our stories
- 09-04-22
Helpful in understanding self and others
I found this book by accident, having been disappointed by one I tried to read before this. I’m grateful to have discovered this book. It takes a lot of strength to write a book like this. I’m hoping that the writer benefited as much from writing this book as I did from reading/listening to it.
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- Sadie
- 08-22-15
fascinating story
I really enjoyed it, and it made me really think about memories. I had a grandma with Alzheimer's, and I wonder if in her last Times that this was what she experienced. also, David just seems like he would be great to talk to.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Kris
- 12-12-14
Interesting story but the narrator was unbearable
What made the experience of listening to The Answer to the Riddle Is Me the most enjoyable?
The story is very interesting introspective look at an amnesiac who tries to rediscover himself.
How could the performance have been better?
The narrator has a rather obnoxious affect to his voice which detracted significantly from the story, and his impressions of Indian Asian speakers was more annoying that I would have liked. I would rather have the actual author of this book, David MacLean, to have read it, instead. Like many others, I first heard this story when the author read a compelling excerpt of his book on the "This American Life" radio program. That performance was far more compelling than the disappointing and presumptuous presentation that Neil Shah gives here on Audible. It was distracting to say the least.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Nancy, New Jersey
- 12-12-22
Mixed Emotions
A witty, well written memoir but some difficult, confusing sections where it is challenging to determine what is real, as it was for the main character.
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