This is one of the most unfathomable and incredible inventories of mental healthcare's failures, as told through short, stoic vignettes of each individual's plight. The work is thinly veiled and it does not take the armchair feminist or historian long to identify some of the parties, including lesbian radicals, gay poets, and stunted revolutionaries.

Of greatest profundity is a final piece on the narrator's brother's death that brings the work home, with abrupt intimacy.