Patient 12A

Patient 12A is Lesedi Molefi’s recounting of his heartbreaking life story from the perspective of a stint in a mental health clinic in South Africa. It’s a story of intergenerational trauma, disrupted family structures and structural racism. The best kind of memoir manages to bridge between the deeply personal and the universal human experience. In this case, the leaning is towards the former and at 400 pages it is a long read that is less attuned to the reader’s experience than it is to the writer’s interiority, something perhaps necessary for sense-making in the presence of fractured identity and shaky internal ground. The relatability of this story arises less from the writer’s ability to connect – in itself a feature of the whole-being suffering associated with trauma – and more from the tragic commonalities with the experiences of the majority of South Africans.