You Just Have to Read This: Books by Wesleyan Alumni Authors

In this series, we review a selection of books by alumni. The volumes, sent to us by alumni, are forwarded to Olin Memorial Library as donations to the University’s collection and made available to the Wesleyan community.

Melissa Pace ’84, P’17, The Once and Future Me (Henry Holt and Co.)

In this fiercely original debut, Melissa Pace delivers a psychological thriller that refuses to sit neatly in one genre. Set in 1954 Virginia, the novel opens with a woman who wakes on a patient-transport bus bound for Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital with no memory of how she got there. She is told her name is Dorothy Frasier, but internally she knows none of this fits. As the story unfolds, it becomes certain she’s someone else entirely, while strange and hallucinatory episodes thrust her into a vision of the future, specifically the year 2035—or do they?

Pace blends dystopian speculation, feminist historical fiction, and mind-bending sci-fi structure in one robust package. Akin to books like Dark Matter and Girl, Interrupted, this novel is a standout for readers who relish layered psychological thrillers with a strong female voice and a dose of speculative reality.

Melissa Pace ’84, P’17 lives in Los Angeles and this is her debut novel. She is a former editor and writer for Elle Magazine and a past finalist in the Humanitas New Voices fellowship for emerging television and screenwriters.

Erin Daly ’83, Dignity in America: Transforming Social Conflicts (Stanford University Press)

In Dignity in America: Transforming Social Conflicts, Erin Daly shifts focus from narrative fiction to the pressing terrain of social justice, dignity, and national identity. She argues that “dignity”—the inherent and equal worth of every person—offers a fresh lens through which to understand and resolve the deep-seated conflicts dividing the nation. Rather than viewing societal fault lines solely through the prism of politics or ideology, Daly invites us to ask: How do our choices (legal, social, economic) protect or degrade human dignity? How might a dignity-based framework guide us to better solutions? Though grounded in legal and social scholarship, the book is timely and relevant to anyone interested in the “big questions” of justice, human value, and civic life.

Erin Daly ’83 is a professor emerita of law at Widener University Delaware Law School and directs the Dignity Rights Clinic.

Leon J. Hilton ’07, Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance (University of Minnesota Press) 

In Counter-cartographies, Leon J. Hilton offers a deeply original work at the intersection of performance studies, disability theory, and neurodiversity. The subtitle hints at the book’s aim: exploring how the neurodivergent experience has been mapped, performed, contested, and even transformed across the latter half of the 20th century to the present. Hilton traverses terrains from the asylum to the stage, from theory to lived experience, asking: What if neurodivergent ways of being are not deviations to correct but “world-making” forces in their own right? This book is less a mainstream narrative and more a richly textured academic investigation with clear implications for how we conceive of identity, performance, difference, and possibility.

Leon J. Hilton ’07 is associate chair and associate professor of theatre arts and performance studies, and co-convener of the Disability Studies Working Group, at Brown University.