56 pages • 1 hour read
Sarah Pekkanen, Greer HendricksAn Anonymous Girl: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: Historical Controversy in Psychology
Although the field of psychology has made strides in modern times toward more ethical approaches, laws, and standards, its history is in many ways fraught with controversy and abuse in an area of study that is still considered new and in development. Some specific examples of historical controversy within psychology include the use of lobotomies, the experimentation of various drugs on human patients, and the undertaking of famously unethical studies, such as the Stanford experiment on role adoption and the Little Albert phobia experiment. Many of these studies caused real and significant harm to patients. Today, codes such as the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct, created and implemented by the American Psychological Association, mitigate any tendencies toward abuse, maltreatment, and other ethical issues in relation to psychological studies and treatment.
Within An Anonymous Girl, Jessica becomes trapped in a psychologically torturous and manipulative bond with a psychologist named Dr. Shields. Dr. Shields acts as a stereotypical sinister mental health professional who uses her knowledge and skills in dealing with people to control Jessica’s thoughts and actions. Dr. Shields often refers to specific real-life studies as she makes observations and plans out her experiment; one example of this is the invisible gorilla experiment, which Dr. Shields refers to when she realizes that she focused so much on Thomas that she didn’t realize Jessica was just as much of a threat. Because of Dr. Shields’s role as a sinister psychologist, the novel plays into stereotypes and dying tropes of this type of mental health professional.
Authorial Context: Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
Co-authors Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen wrote An Anonymous Girl, along with their first psychological thriller novel, The Wife Between Us, line-by-line, together as a united creative force. This particular style of writing brings its own unique challenges and is rarely attempted, but thanks to collaborative solutions like Google Docs and Hangouts, the duo has found a system that allows them to draft and hash out ideas together to create a unified work (Lindsay, Leslie. “Dynamic Writing Duo Is Back This Winter with Wickedly Smart and Compulsive Psychological Thriller Featuring Therapist-Client Relationships in AN ANONYMOUS GIRL.” Leslie A. Lindsay, 9 Jan. 2019).
For this particular novel, the co-authors wanted to further explore human psychology by taking a direct look into the nature of a sinister client-patient relationship centered on The Stronghold of Obsession. Like their first work, the plot is intricate, offering constant twists, throwing the reader (and the protagonist) in all sorts of directions, and withholding the full truth until the novel’s final pages. In an interview, Hendricks and Pekkanen expressed their desire to bring the reader directly into the story. They accomplish this by using second-person perspective in Dr. Shields’s narrations, as well as by presenting the moral questions that Jessica answers to the reader—such as “Would you ever read a spouse’s/significant other’s text messages?” (23)—so that they can consider their own responses as the story unfolds (Lindsay). Many of these questions are common moral quandaries that people encounter in their daily lives. In this sense, readers are invited to question The Nature of Morality and their own part in it. Finally, Hendricks and Pekkanen promise to continue featuring strong female protagonists in their novels—something that is important to them as popular fiction authors.
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