Show notes
Alicia Berenson shot her husband five times and has not spoken since. Theo Faber is the psychotherapist who takes a job at her secure unit specifically to treat her. Full spoilers throughout, including the twist. Content note: suicide.
Alex and Lindsey get into Theo as a narrator you’re set up to trust and shouldn’t, and the gap between being fluent in therapy language and having actually done the work. They track the chance his own therapist offers him to break the pattern, and what he does with it instead. Plus the book’s central question, whether anyone is born evil or whether that’s just a more comfortable story than admitting you made choices, and why Theo’s answer changes by the end.
They also compare notes on when each of them clocked the twist, which turns out to be two different wrong theories arriving at roughly the right suspicion.
Also: how much sympathy Alicia deserves as the person all of this happened to, what the snow is doing at the end, and the difference between putting a coping mechanism down and quietly swapping it for another one.
Cry count and ratings at the end.