Book Review: Tell Me Who You Are by Louisa Luna

Dr. Caroline Strange has something of a chip on her shoulder. She’s worked hard to transform herself from an awkward blue collar Midwestern teenager to a soignee East Coast psychotherapist with an artist husband and two young sons. She works out of the basement of their Brooklyn home, listening to her patients and helping them work through their issues while keeping an acerbic running commentary, mostly of exasperation, in her head. She prides herself on her professionalism and discretion, however, often assuring her patients of the confidentiality of their sessions:

Imagine weighing yourself on a bathroom scale, and all the little black lines represent all the things you can tell me–the dial can bounce up and down as many times as you want, and your secrets will be safe with me. There’s only one red line we have to worry about, only one little tick mark where the dial has to land in order for me to break my promise, and that would be if you told me you were going to murder someone.

 

My anorexics love this metaphor.

So when a young man going by the name of Nelson Schack shows up for an appointment one day and tells her that he is indeed going to kill someone, she goes on alert but doesn’t necessarily take him seriously. Lots of people fantasize about killing others but never actually act on the impulse, and Dr. Caroline (as she insists her patients call her) wants to better evaluate his situation before she calls the cops. If Dr. Caroline is being honest, she’s less concerned that he’s about to kill someone than by his other statement to her before he runs away from her office. Unsettlingly, he claims to know who she really is, a reference that could just mean he’s googled her grisly past or could, like his declaration of murderous intent, have far more sinister implications.

It takes a visit from NYPD Police Detective Makeda Marks and her junior partner Miguel Jimenez to convince Dr. Caroline that Nelson wasn’t just blowing off steam. Journalist Ellen Garcia has gone missing and has presumably been kidnapped. Several months ago, Ellen wrote an article accusing Dr. Caroline of some pretty unsavory practices. When the cops ask her about this, Dr. Caroline tries to pretend that the article didn’t bother her, bringing up Nelson’s threat instead. Unfortunately for Dr. Caroline, Makeda is fairly skeptical of her claims, seeing no reason for any of this to stop the detective from continuing to treat her as a person of interest. 

Annoyed at what she sees as police incompetence and convinced that Nelson must have had something to do with Ellen’s disappearance, Dr. Caroline decides to investigate for herself. The intake information Nelson gave her proves fake, solidifying her conviction in his involvement even as it makes it harder for her to track him down. But Nelson himself finds it difficult to stay away from Dr. Caroline, even though his only hints as to why lie in a past she thought she’d long left behind. Will she have to face up to her buried secrets once more in order to figure out who Nelson really is and stop him before he can take an innocent life?

I was highly impressed with Louisa Luna’s decision to set much of this novel shortly after the pandemic lockdowns were lifted: it’s a complicated time to write about, and she does so with aplomb. But perhaps most impressive was the way therapy is shown to have great value, even if therapists themselves aren’t always perfect people:

I know she is referencing my past and at the same time slighting my profession, and actually both are fine with me. Everyone, even in New York City, has an opinion about shrinks and mental health treatment in general. There’s still a stigma that it’s for neurotic Woody Allen types of straitjacket-wriggling madmen only, and that the rest of us should just be able to white-knuckle it through life without ever speaking freely to another human being.

 

And as for my past, well, everyone can use a computer, can’t she? Police detectives and psycho kidnappers alike, and Makeda is clearly not alone in researching little old me.

It’s intriguing to see how Dr. Caroline and Makeda are pitted against one another despite working towards the same goal, and how their approaches to their professions could very much be the reason for this. As Makeda seeks to take a holistic approach to the problem, Dr. Caroline takes a far narrower focus, even as the question of whom the reader can really trust takes center stage.

Tell Me Who You Are is a wild ride of a psychological thriller that shifts between multiple narrators and timelines as it gradually unfolds Dr. Caroline’s strange history. I’m not gonna lie: the thing with the garbage disposal freaked me out. Part of me wonders if the coda lessens the impact of the story by, perhaps ironically, furthering the reader’s understanding of Dr. Caroline’s motivations. Gray areas are, I suppose, always more muted in impact than the stark contrast of black and white, though can be just as rewarding in the hands of a writer as talented as Louisa Luna.