"Cinematic, dreamlike, at times brutal yet poignant." --Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face "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 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 a new drug, Memoroxin. An emerging photographer, he's also running from the sudden death of his mother, a well-known artist whose legacy haunts him even far from New York. Sophie has just landed the lead in the upcoming performance of La Sylphide with the Los Angeles Ballet. She still waitresses during her off-hours at the Chateau Marmont, 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 one another. Is it attraction, or something they cannot remember from "before"? Set in a city that seems to have no memory 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 even set us free.
