The Inventory

In June 2021, Arthur Holm, a forty-four-year-old psychiatrist with a practice in Marin County and a marriage that ended quietly years before, walks away from his life and sits down on a bench in Berkeley's Civic Center. He does not lose his mind. He does not hit bottom. He chooses. What follows is three years on that bench: the notebook he begins filling, the philosopher who sits down uninvited and refuses to be uninteresting, the two high school girls who bring him pastries and then, over time, something more complicated. And Amelie, his daughter, nineteen years old, in Copenhagen, living a life that is entirely her own, whom he has failed in the specific ways that take the longest to name. The Inventory is a novel about what it costs to stop long enough to see your own life clearly, and whether, having seen it, you can become the person you actually are. Quiet, exact, and deeply felt, it is one man's three-year accounting of everything he carried, everything he set down, and what he found when he finally looked.