Excerpt from Daniel Isn't Talking by Marti Leimbach, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The fact is I had no intention of being there when she died. I could not face it. I am a woman of great energy, compulsively active, given to fits of laughter, to sudden anger, to passionate and impossible love affairs. But the truth is I am a coward. Or was a coward.


I call my shrink, Shrink. Not to his face, of course. I also call him Jacob. He seems as fascinated by my being American as I am by his being black, a Londoner, and having almost no visible hair on his body at all except this one thing, his graying mustache, which he is often seen poking at with a slim forefinger. He has the delicate hands of a surgeon, but everything else about him is stocky, compact. His leather chair is faded where his head rests, and there are cracks around the edge of the cushion where his legs bend.

"So that's it, that's all you want to say about your mother?" he says. He sighs, crosses his legs. His laconic air is in direct contrast to my own pulsating, nervous energy. He says, "She died and you weren't there. Okay, how about before that? What about when you were growing up?"

My shrink is a man who wants to reveal me, and yet I know nothing about him. I am sure this is the right and proper way for a patient and therapist to operate, but it feels cold to me. I cannot think of anyone in my life now who wants to see inside me for what is good and right, only those who want to find what is wrong. And that's so easy--everything is wrong. I tell Jacob, "My mother was at work. I don't remember. It doesn't matter."

"Run that by me again?" he says.

"What about how I feel right now?"

It is as though I've eaten a vat of speed; my mind races along trailing incoherencies and half-finished thoughts. There's a continual restlessness in all four of my limbs; I am hungry almost all the time, except when I eat. Two bites and I feel sick. All this has come upon me gradually over the past months. That confident, breezy woman who Stephen saw at a party all those years ago is not me anymore. I am her shadow.

"Jacob," I sigh. "Be a pal and medicate me."

He says, "Melanie, you're going to need to relax about all that or else we won't get anywhere at all."

But I can't relax, which is why I am here. I used to read books by the score but now I find I am unable to concentrate. I go to the library, trying to find a book that might help me, but even the self-help books seem indecipherable. I'm lucky if I can remember a phone number. So instead I wander. I visit all-night cafés on the Edgware Road where teenagers suck sweet tobacco from hookahs; I go traipsing round the New Covent Garden Market, picking lonely flower stems from the shiny cement floor. I'll be at a train station at midnight with no ticket. I might be writing a list on a notepad held in my palm. Or staring at the blank walls of the station or wherever I am, which is anywhere you can linger instead of sleep. During the day, my hands sometimes tremble with fatigue. I squint at sunlight, splash cold water on my face, review the notes I have written to myself reminding me what to do. I set the alarm on my ugly electronic watch, a watch I found in a public toilet at Paddington, in case I fall asleep by accident. I have children to look after, to sing to, play with. I regard them as one might the queen's largest jewels. They receive my best--my only--real efforts.

"I'm just after some help," I tell Jacob. "I am worried all the time."

Excerpted from Daniel Isn't Talking by Marti Leimbach Copyright © 2006 by Marti Leimbach. Excerpted by permission of Nan A. Talese, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.