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Speaker - Alice LaPlante: Point-of-view
and The Unreliable Narrator
Pacific Grove Community Center
515 Junipero Avenue, PG
630pm
knows all about the Unreliable
Narrator. She created one in her bestselling novel,
Turn of Mind (Grove Atlantic, 2011) featuring
an Alzheimer’s patient who is accused of murdering
her best friend. Alice will be unraveling the mysteries
of point-of-view at the May 15 meeting of Central
Coast Writers.
Readers rely on the novel’s narrator
– usually the lead character or protagonist –
to convey accurate and true information. But what
happens when the narrator is incapable of doing that?
The protagonist could be a five-year-old child (Room
by Emma Donoghue), an autistic teen (The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark
Haddon), or a criminal covering up his crime (The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie). Alice
LaPlante joins the list with her literary thriller
starring Dr. Jennifer White, a retired orthopedic
surgeon suffering from dementia.
The Los Angeles Times noted
in its review, “Alzheimer’s disease doesn’t
seem like a great subject for a page turner, and yet
a page turner is exactly what Alice LaPlante has crafted.
She manages to take hold of the aforementioned dread
and modulate it . . . with the suspense developing
partly in the real world, partly in the narrator’s
unreliable mind.”
Turn of Mind became a New York Times, NPR,
and American Independent Booksellers Association
bestseller within a month of release. Turn of Mind
was also designated a New York Times Editors' Choice,
an NPR, O Magazine, Vogue, and Globe and
Mail Summer Reading Pick, and was featured in
Barnes & Noble’s 2011 Discover Great New
Writers program.
Alice was a Wallace Stegner Fellow
and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and teaches
creative writing at both Stanford and San Francisco
State University. The author of five books (and counting),
Alice includes among her publications a writing textbook,
Method and Madness: The Making of a Story,
published by W.W. Norton in 2009; Playing For Profit:
How Digital Entertainment is Making Big Business Out
of Child's Play (Wiley, 2000); and Passion
to Profits: Business for Non-Business Majors (The
Planning Shop, 2008). Alice has a B.A. in Rhetoric
and an MBA from the University of Illinois in Urbana.
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