Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Fiction & Related items

THE MIND REELS

Fredrik deBoer

A Novel

The Mind Reels is a short novel about a young woman named Alice who goes to college, and starts to suffer from mental illness, and then suffers more. It draws from the author's experiences. It will be Fredrik deBoer's first novel.

It is an extraordinarily straightforward novel, but a thrilling one. Like a boulder rolling down-hill toward a cabin: even though we see where this is going, it is captivating, and not a little frightening. Many other novels and memoirs have depicted mental illness, and treatment. But so many of them shy away from embracing the brisk reality of what it's really like, and, instead, attend to familiar storytelling devices and proper arrangements of dramatic tension and release. As deBoer might say: mental illness is not exciting. It certainly does not daintily follow the form of a well-told story. Not in the classical sense. But here, in The Mind Reels, there is an excitement in being permitted to see something develop that almost always develops out of sight. The experience of reading it gives the feeling of an impossibly intrusive case study. It succeeds by tantalizing the reader with an accumulation of very, very true-seeming experiences, instead of another collection of cliches.

This is a novel that can make a splash, especially with young people. It has a sheerness of reality, and a total attention to true detail. No item of Alice's dorm room, or her first drunken party, or her fraying relationships with her friends and family (who only want to help her) is out of place, or out of touch with the truth. This can be a novel that really spreads, because it really tells the truth, and it really doesn't sound like anything else.

Fredrik deBoer is a writer and academic. He is the author of two works of nonfiction, published with St Martin's Press and Simon & Schuster. His newsletter is one of the most shared and subscribed on the substack platform.

Available products
Book Published 2025-10-07 by Coffee House Press

Comments

Our current mental health discourse . . . treats psychological illness as a charming personality quirk. . . . The Mind Reels is a corrective to such assumptions. Alice's decline is not sexy or romantic it's like watching a car crash unfold in slow motion.

A searing portrait of a woman on the brink.

One of the most precise and harrowing depictions of mental illness I've ever read. This is a relentless, compassionate, and beautiful debut novel. I couldn't look away.

The core of this compact novel is so tough and powerful. It has the verisimilitude of a case study and the dread of an existential drama.

The Mind Reels is that rarest of things: a novel that is genuinely important. DeBoer delivers truths about mental illness that many of us may find both surprising and haunting. That he does this in the context of a novel that is beautifully written, character-driven and pulsing with forward momentum makes it a real artistic achievement as well as an intellectual one.

The Mind Reels names the horrible, terrifying slog of mental illness. The episodic mania and sexuality that other books quietly glorify aren't titillating in the slightest. They're merely reported for what they are; harrowing experiences of human illness. DeBoer doesn't present them clinically or indulgently. He presents them honestly.

Slim but powerful, gripping without making any effort to manipulate the reader through a redemptive plot arc or even milking sympathy.

Instead of falling into clichés or sentimentality about mental health, deBoer presents Alice's struggles with bleak humor and emotional clarity. His compelling novel . . . [grapples] unflinchingly with [mental illness] and modern alienation in a way that will captivate readers.

[The Mind Reels's] power lies in its relentless banality the mind churning while life's machinery grinds on.

We don't have a solution for the Alices of the world. . . . But after reading this novel, perhaps some people might have a smidgen more of sympathy for Alice, for Jordan Neelyeven for themselves.