The Smallest Universe

This book is my memory.

So begins a story chronicled in the tattered journal of Mary Cross, kept in an old accounting book that was a gift from her father when she left home at age sixteen. It is a chronicle of experiences, struggles, and breakthroughs of a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia, traumatized by the most vivid of visions and voices. But were these episodes, fugues, or “spells,” as her ex Gregory used to call them, something else entirely? Mary's journey toward truth and overcoming her symptoms takes her far away, where she learns the rest of the story her visions and voices had always told her, from a past she did not know.

With a childlike perception of danger and wonder that is vocative of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, luminous with passion and mystery as Alice Hoffman's Turtle Moon, Wm. Anthony Connolly's newest novel is a resonant journey into what is real, and what is imagined, and why it matters.

After years of quiet, Mary finds herself once again overtaken by spells that feel as if she's fallen into a black hole, where she encounters fragments of dreamlike, indistinct voices, whispering in a tide of truth that will not be muffled, no matter how it ultimately rearranges the world around her. She struggles to make sense of the chaotic patterns of light and shadow, visual experiences that are as real to her as the ground underneath her feet. She finds comfort in writing down her perceptions in an old journal, faithfully recording nonsensical mutterings as well as deeply meaningful phrases. Mary also finds the patterns of the universe line up with what she's experiencing, and give her a language to describe to herself what is happening. Diagnosed with mental illness as a child and institutionalized, she escaped and found that once away, the episodes stopped. Mary was able to make her way in the world, finding love and settling down to mundane life. Until she visited Scotland for her grandfather's funeral, and found herself in a street at once familiar and frightening, and the visions and voices descended upon her once again.