Going undercover to rescue her wrongly committed sister from a notorious asylum, Charlotte uncovers a dangerous secret about the institution and why their fellow inmates were put away.

Raising fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress, the author draws on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs to write about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.

A ward attendant at Paris’s Salpêtrière asylum assigned to care for Josephine, Doctor Jean-Martin Charcot’s famous patient, Laure, to save her from spiraling into seeming insanity, plots their escape, but must first confirm whether she is truly a madwoman or a murderer—or something even darker.