Challenging times: A novelist-physician probes family, mental illness, and impostor syndrome

Author and physician Erin Miller Reid frames But For Fortune as a story about timing, family stories, and the continuity of pressure on women across decades. The novel uses two timelines to link a 1950s housewife's experience with that of a later-generation medical student, showing both change and continuity in how women live, suffer, and seek meaning.

Dual timelines and central characters

Mary Esther is a young housewife and mother in the 1950s. She faces confinement in a small town, a marriage to an alcoholic husband, and a mental illness that is misdiagnosed and mistreated. Reid uses Mary Esther's story to expose the antiquated, often cruel psychiatric treatments of the past, and to show how families frequently hid such struggles behind shame and secrecy.

Corinth is a medical student roughly 50 years later. She struggles with feelings of inadequacy and not belonging. Through Corinth, the novel examines impostor syndrome — especially as it affects high-achieving, perfectionist women working in stressful, hierarchical environments. Reid reports re-experiencing her own past feelings of dread, anxiety, self-doubt, and rejection while writing Corinth's arc.

Narrative inheritance and the cost of silence

Reid introduces the concept of "narrative inheritance" — the idea that families pass down stories that shape identity. When families conceal mental illness, she argues, that heritage is lost and later generations can feel unmoored and uncertain. Her own motivation included a search for knowledge about her grandmother, who struggled with mental illness, and a wish to understand what that past meant for current family members.

Clinical background informing fiction

Two themes run clearly through the book: the removal of shame around mental illness, and the experience of persistent pressure on women to perform and prove themselves. Reid wants readers to see progress in treatment while recognizing lingering societal burdens. She intends Mary Esther's story to encourage openness about mental health and Corinth's to illuminate the continuing weight of self-doubt for women entering demanding careers.

For Fortune is published by the University Press of Kentucky. Reid hopes readers take away the perseverance of her main characters — flawed people who nonetheless continue to strive toward hope despite obstacles.

• The novel connects midcentury psychiatric mistreatment and modern clinical training.
• Family secrecy around mental illness can erase narrative inheritance and harm later generations.
• Impostor syndrome is shown as an enduring professional hazard for ambitious women in medicine.

Reid's combination of personal family history and professional experience shapes a novel that is about illness, identity, and the pressures women face across time.