Laurel Brett

“The confrontation between the protesters, the police, and the army had gone on all night. The police made arrests.”
― Laurel Brett, The Schrödinger Girl: A Novel

“You explained to me theories about different realities. What if this is true for all of us, and we are unaware of these realities, in the same way we can’t hear a dog whistle or see ultraviolet light, but we know those sounds and sights are real? What if there are as many Garretts as there are Daphnes? What if reality is so complex that there are worlds upon worlds of alternate realities and alternate Carolines, Garretts, Daphnes, and Toms? What if there’s a Garrett who is running a rat experiment right now, and one who’s a physicist and one who is serving his country in Vietnam, but we have no access to these realities?” “Exactly,” I said. “What if?”
― Laurel Brett, The Schrödinger Girl: A Novel

“Just as in Borges, these were forking paths. At the pulsing point of divergence, one girl became four different girls, and even the inner kernel of self became reshaped by the path she traveled. The Schrödinger girls both were and weren’t the same person. The metaphysical implications were dizzying, raising questions about the nature of the self that psychology might never answer. Behaviorism didn’t ask any of these questions, and the rest of my training as a psychologist hadn’t prepared me to answer them either.”
― Laurel Brett, The Schrödinger Girl: A Novel

“reviewed these implications in my mind, assuring myself that I understood what I had just read: Daphne was a set of possibilities, and each possibility became manifest in a new universe when the universe branched off, as Borges had said it would. But once this new universe branched off, it could never interact with the previous universe. They split completely. But the question still remained: why could I interact with all four?”
― Laurel Brett, The Schrödinger Girl: A Novel