But For Fortune by Erin Miller Reid
Review by Rachel Shaver
“That’s why stories were called yarns, Corinth thought. They were what held everything together, what linked the past to present.”
Much like a medical chart, But For Fortune by Erin Miller Reid chronicles life through the only lens it has. It details the past life of Mary Esther alongside Corinth, a medical student and granddaughter who seems to have inherited Mary Esther’s mental illness as well as her shining intelligence. With only a file of dates and treatments to trace the history of the once brilliant woman, Corinth seeks to understand who Mary Esther—Granny—was beyond the timeline of illness and medicine that was left behind to define her.
The novel takes us back to Mary Esther's youth in 1940s Appalachia. She is an intelligent, musically gifted young woman who grows up poor and ostracized before marrying the coal miner Eldon Eaton. As her marriage grows abusive and her mental health deteriorates, Mary Esther is eventually committed to Maxwood State Hospital, separated from her very young son and subjected to the only psychiatric treatments of the era, as barbaric as some of them are.
More than fifty years later, Corinth is facing mental health struggles of her own. In the endless politics and drama of medical school, she is unexpectedly blamed for a patient's nearly fatal surgical delay after a resident ignores her warnings and removes any evidence of her speaking up. At the same time, she is struggling with depression and beginning to wonder how much beyond her intelligence she may have inherited from her grandmother.
“The grass blades fought through curved leaf hulls, reaching for light, tilting toward survival. The will of those blades of grass weren’t much different than her own fight… Corinth knew she must lean toward light.”
Told in two timelines, the distinction between Corinth and Mary Esther’s circumstances is clear immediately. Where Corinth gets SSRIs, Granny was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. And what stems from both timelines—within and beyond the medical scope—is a recurring thematic question of who gets to tell someone’s story. In Mary Esther’s case, all that’s left of her story is a trail of data supporting her “madness.” Her medical files preserve only symptoms and reactions, the town remembers her as strange and dangerous after an incident where they remember Mary Esther tried to shoot her husband.
In the present day, Corinth is experiencing this bias twofold. Through her surgery rotation, Corinth is, again and again, humiliated by her senior resident, Wes Hickman. Even after a patient is affected by Hickman’s behavior, he physically alters a medical record, skewing it from Corinth’s favor. It seems in any case, his influence will control how she is seen, how her story will be told. The novel is structured so that Corinth’s search to find the truth of Mary Esther aligns with her investigation into uncovering the truth of the medical error, freeing both from the trap of ignorance.
In a compelling craft choice, Reid allows the reader more than she allows Corinth. We follow Mary Esther directly in scene, and where Corinth is left unknowing, the reader begins to understand Mary Esther intimately. We are afforded the truth of her story, but more beyond that too. Mary Esther’s character is handled carefully, built around much more than just her illness and her abuse. Through some of the novel’s most beautiful prose, Mary Esther’s love for music becomes a sort of antithesis to the inaccuracies of storykeeping. Where rumor and documentation are nebulous, music is always concrete, and for Mary Esther, it is sometimes all she has.
“No matter what passed, no matter what was lost or taken away, no matter how withered in body and spirit, Mary Esther had shown them that the music never left.”
But For Fortune’s balance between realism and accessibility is worth noting as well. Reid successfully incorporates the jargonistic medical terminology while keeping it approachable to any reader. And beyond that, the medical plays a role that ends up feeling like much more than just an interesting backdrop. Corinth’s interiority naturally moves to science and medicine the way Mary Esther’s turns to music. In this, the prose is able to use both the complex and the occasionally ugly side of medicine to give us access to Corinth. She uses the law of conservation of energy to understand emotion, or dissects cadavers and comes to understand her own father’s death in a new way. Her expertise has her especially equipped to understand her own mental illness, so her lingering turmoil is both smart and powerfully tense for Reid to weave in.
Occasionally, the metaphors work against the novel’s subtlety. But For Fortune, is a novel of endless parallels, and it is strongest where those connections seem to come about inevitably or spontaneously. Though at some points the novel speaks its mind louder than necessary, the imagery is still strong enough that the novel does not suffer much from pushing the thematic connection.
There is something essential in the themes of this story, still. The topics of mental health, specifically for women, are paramount, both then and now. In creating this novel, Reid has managed to touch on both and reclaim the narrative truth both Corinth and Mary Esther deserved.
“Not everything can be fixed, and not everything turns out the way it should. But this time, I get to choose what happens.”
Rating: ★★★★☆
For those who spent this year glued to The Pitt, another wonderful character-driven story set in the medical world. A complex, intergenerational story of memory and mental illness.
Erin Miller Reid is a writer and physician from southeastern Kentucky. Her work has appeared in North Carolina Literary Review, Still, Appalachian Review, Women Speak: Women of Appalachia Project, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, 100 Days in Appalachia, and the anthology Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky. She earned her master of public health and doctor of medicine degrees at the University of Kentucky and completed education in narrative medicine at Columbia University.
Rachel Shaver graduated from Eckerd College with a BA in creative writing and a minor in literature. She lives in Tampa, Florida with her twin sister and spends her days consuming media in all forms. She has been published in Collision Literary Magazine and worked as editor-in-chief for Eckerd Review, as well as editorial intern for Cleaver Magazine.
