Lotus

PTSD stands for post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a mental condition that some people develop after they experience an event that threatens their life or well-being. While the characters demonstrate signs of PTSD, there is no explicit diagnosis until the end. While reviewing Oliver, his abduction, and his seeing Travis sexually abuse Clem, Sydney declares, “Everything faded away—a defense mechanism, a repressed memory, combined with years of psychological trauma, force-fed lies, and PTSD. Missing memories are common with PTSD victims, even more so if Oliver witnessed a traumatic event prior to the abduction” (547). By withholding the term until the end, the novel focuses on Oliver’s experience as an individual: He’s a character with a specific set of painful experiences that he navigates. PTSD is an applicable and real condition, and through Oliver, Hartmann explores the condition’s nuances.

The Cleveland Clinic lists many of the signs of PTSD on its PTSD information page. The signs link to Sydney’s quote, as they include anxiety, shame, guilt, “moodiness,” and “flashbacks.” The “flashbacks” are key to the story, as Oliver and Sydney’s characters regularly return to the July 2-4,1998 period to piece together what happened and why. The novel’s exploration of PTSD links to the theme of the power and elusive meaning of memories: The characters replay the memories because they impact their present, but also because the details stay out of reach. They have to go back and look harder to gain resolution. By facing their traumatic memories, they lose their fragmented quality and expose Travis.

Oliver sees a hypnotherapist to help him confront his memories. John Hopkins Medicine has a page dedicated to “hypnosis.” While the method helps with a specific goal, like stopping smoking, hypnosis for memory retrieval remains questionable. The process tends to produce dubious or distorted memories. In Lotus, the hypnotherapist helps Oliver retrieve valid memories, yet Oliver leaves before he discovers what occurred between Travis and Clem on July 2, 1998. As recovering the truth of the memory occurs separately from hypnotherapy, Hartmann avoids linking it to a controversial method, which would cast doubt on Travis’s guilt. More so, the novel indicates that memory retrieval is a complex process. The true memory is a product of Sydney, Oliver, Oliver’s comic book, and photographs from a neighbor.

While Oliver is the only character to receive an overt PTSD diagnosis, it is implied that the other characters also experience trauma. Sydney feels shame and guilt over Oliver’s abduction. As they were best friends, the loss particularly pains her. She tells Oliver, “You have no idea what it was like to be haunted by you for twenty-two years, then to hold you in my hands, flesh and bone, like you were back from the dead. You couldn’t understand any of that” (396). The attacker and attempted murder adds another traumatic experience, as now Sydney sometimes feels unsafe in her own home. Clem, too, manifests symptoms of trauma when she abruptly leaves after a sexual partner calls her “babygirl,” and when she becomes excessively protective of her daughter Poppy. The characters are not a monolithic block; they’re individuals facing hurt in their own ways.