Bailey's Beads — Terry Wolverton

Do we truly know the ones we love or do we invent them, turning them into fictions, projections of our own desires? When a chance car accident sends author Bryn Redding into a deep coma, a whole luminous life is eclipsed, plunged into a state of darkness. The only glimmers that remain appear through the perceptions of those who love her, but contradictions between these views render them suspect. These images of Bryn conflict acutely for Djuna, Bryn's lover of four years, and Vera, Bryn's mother. Gathered at her hospital bedside, each stakes a claim to Bryn's identity, her past and future. Who is Bryn Redding? Is she the difficult, angry girl her mother remembers, or the vibrant iconoclast her lover adores? To Vera, it seems the child she once thought she knew has grown into a stranger, someone she can scarcely recognize. For Djuna, the possibility of loss moves her to cling even more ferociously to her idealized vision of Bryn. As friends from the present and past-the community Bryn has built to supplant her family of origin-gather at her side, a many-faceted picture emerges of a woman whose inner life is a mystery. When one of these friends presents Vera with copies of Bryn's published works, Vera comes to understand that her memories of the past contrast irreconcilably with her daughter's. Bryn's tough, spare writing provides yet another picture of Bryn Redding, the manufactured layers of personae and the history that lurks beneath, all the while cautioning the reader that fiction is never a reliable mirror of reality. As Bryn hovers between life and death, the antagonism between Vera and Djuna ebbs, each coming to recognize that the Bryn of their imaginations will never be restored to them, and that her recovery, if achieved at all, will yield further mysteries. BAILEY'S BEADS is a beautifully written, perceptive and sexy novel that explores the very nature of identity and the possibility of ever really knowing another person.