Since You Ask is easy to
read and difficult to grasp.  Wareham
writes largely in dialog without much context setting. She disorients her readers
with the sparse information she provides; furthermore, the story  told by Betsey shifts between the past and
the present frequently, and most characters are not fleshed out.  It is apparent from the start that Betsy is
a young woman from a wealthy Manhattan family who is seeing a
psychiatrist.  It turns out that she is
a patient at some kind of open psychiatric hospital, Dobson House, where she
can come and go as she wants.  Gradually
it becomes clearer that she has problems in her relationships with men, that
she takes too many street drugs, and that her problems stem from her early
experiences with her brother Raymond. 
There was never any explicit family acknowledgement of what happened,
but Ray was sent away from the home for many years.   Her early and prolonged sexual abuse led her to have
inappropriate sexual relationships, causing her even more suffering.  She is on heavy psychotropic drugs like
Haldol, and she seems self-destructive. 
Her time in the psychiatric hospital helps her to take more control of
her life.  Especially important for her
is her psychiatrist, Dr. Keats, who seems to be the only person to really
understand her. 

As the book proceeds, it becomes
easier to follow.  Betsey’s character
and motivation become more consistent, and the actions of the people around her
also become more transparent.  She ends
up being sympathetic enough for the reader to care about, and the book ends up
holding more attention than it does at its start.  It is hard to say whether it conveys any truth about family abuse
or mental illness, but it is unusual. 
One of its virtues is its description of Betsey as she drifts into
relationships with men who do her no good, even including her brother, since it
provides some sense of how she goes along with their pursuit of her even when
she knows it is a bad idea. 

© 2005 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian Perring, Ph.D., is
Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island, and editor
of Metapsychology Online Review.  His main research is on
philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction