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Mary is a fictionalized memoir written from the perspective of Mary Todd Lincoln while she was committed at the Bellevue Place Sanitarium by her son, Robert Todd. While Mary is in the asylum she looks back on her life and tells her story from her past days of meeting Abraham Lincoln and raising a family, Lincoln's presidency, and his subsequent assassination, to the present day in the asylum and having to live with the truly insane. The book is well written and the author does an excellent job of transitioning between the past and present day so as to not confuse the reader. Each chapter begins with an excerpt from Mary's actual Patient Progress Reports completed by the nurses at the asylum.

Mary had a difficult life: the loss of her husband and three sons, her only living son's cold and unloving character, her addiction to shopping and the tremendous debt she accumulated (so much that even today it would be considered substantial), and the betrayal of her one true friend who wrote an unfavorable book about her. However, despite Mary's hardships, I found it difficult to be sympathetic towards her. I had anticipated learning miraculous things about her life, but instead discovered I don't much like her and found her to be greedy and self indulgent. It was also frustrating to see that Mary either wouldn't or couldn't see that her son, Robert Todd, did not have her best interests at heart in committing her to the asylum despite the numerous occasions he demonstrated that fact by his pompous selfishness. (Perhaps because it was the sign of times for a women not to question the head of the household. But still, frustrating.)

I could never decide if Mary was actually insane (caused from the loss of her husband and children) or whether she was just quirky and eccentric. Certain instances of her insanity (hallucinations of her dead loved ones, paranoia that people were conspiring to kill her) could be attributed to the amount of laudanum, cocaine and other medicinary prescriptions given to her by doctors. Other proof of her lunacy was not proof at all, but rather an addiction to shopping and her lack of self control, clearly that era's version of a shopaholic on a grand scale.

Despite the frustration of Mary's character and the fact that near the end I was growing weary of her self-induced troubles, I was glad to add this to my list of reads. In fact, I found the book so engaging that it took me little more than five days to read its 700 pages, a length of book I don't normally read let alone less than a week's time. It was an interesting viewpoint of an important time in history and gave not only a riveting story of the President and Mrs. Lincoln, but a fascinating account of what life was like for a woman in the 1800s and how they were regarded and expected to act. Certainly a worthwhile read.