Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych E.R.

#969
Title: Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych E.R.
Author: Julie Holland
Publisher: Bantam
Year: 2009/2010
320 pages
A big part of the problem for this memoir (not primarily about the people who transit through Bellevue's Psych ER, but about the writer's personal development) is her use of the present tense. Consider this statement:

"I think of my job as a psychiatrist as being, in many ways, a seduction.... I use my feminine wiles to have my way with the patients..." (109).

Is it meant to be read in the moment of the narrative, first person limited, or is it a more universal, still-true, first person omniscient declaration? If the former, it's a developmental statement; if the latter, a self-statement.

Either way, I don't see much evidence of the author's movement beyond this truth, and, like much of what she reports about her approach to psychiatry, concerns me.