Mozley's 'Awake, Awake' Explores Unreliable Memory and Fractured Identity

In her third novel, Fiona Mozley turns the familiar story of mental illness inside out, giving us not a woman who forgets but one who remembers too much — and cannot tell which memories are hers. Set against the ordinary textures of early 2000s adolescence in York, 'Awake, Awake' follows Mary through a crisis of perception that becomes, in Mozley's hands, a philosophical inquiry into the nature of identity itself. If the self is built from memory, and memory cannot be trusted, the novel asks quietly but insistently: what, in the end, are any of us standing on?