Perfect Beauty: A Novel

In the summer of 1984, Parthia Alexander, a 25-year-old New York model is admitted against her will to North Forks Psychiatric Hospital, her face mutilated by her own hand. The therapist assigned to her is Vale Messenger, a woman new to this work and a single parent, trying to make the best of a second career. When Vale pieces together the secret of Parthia’s past---that Parthia’s father, a cosmetic surgeon, had repeatedly operated on his daughter to turn her into a “perfect beauty”---she is only at the beginning of an ordeal that her clinical supervisor will call “one for the books.” Vale never knew that madness could be such a formidable adversary. is a novel about the nightmare of history, both personal and collective, and is based on a true story.