Dr. Ruth Barnhouse is the first female psychiatrist in the country. Her new patient, who arrives at McLean Hospital one winter morning, is a young poet who has forgotten how to read and write…How these lives and timelines interlock through a kaleidoscope of happenstance and fate speaks to the poetry of life, and the meaning of legacy, as the future of the prized handwritten manuscript lays in the balance.  Like Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife, and Theresa Anne Fowler’s Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. bridges fact and fiction to imagine the life of a revered writer.