Finalist for the 2020 Foreword Indies – Science Fiction Category

What does it mean to say "I love you"?

Ariadne is a single, fortysomething writer and mother embroiled in an affair with a married man. At the core of her current manuscript, a book about the declaration of love, is the need to understand why: why her lover has returned to his wife, why their relationship still lingers in her mind, why she’s unable to conquer her longing. To make ends meet while writing, she joins a research study in which she's paid to live with an AI device called Dirk.

But the study quickly enters uncharted territory. Capable of mapping Ariadne’s brain—and, to some extent, reading her mind—Dirk calls into question issues of both privacy and consciousness: how we communicate our thoughts to others, what it means to embody our desires, and whether we ought to act on them.

Acclaimed writer and critic Marianne Apostolides is the author of five books and one play. Her current writing explores the contact zone between genres – poetry vs. prose, fiction vs. non-fiction, creative vs. critical; it has appeared in The Walrus, Room, and Bookninja.com Magazine, among other publications. She is the recipient of the 2012 Chalmers Arts Fellowship; her book Voluptuous Pleasure was listed among the Top 100 Books of 2012 by Toronto’s Globe & Mail, and her book The Lucky Child was long-listed for the 2010 Relit Award. Marianne lives in Toronto with her two children.

Marianne Apostolides' profile page

• Short-listed, Foreword INDIES

"I Can't Get You Out of My Mind is a grandly ambitious, genre-bending examination of the ambiguities and permutations that underlie our experience of love and the ways it affects us." —Quill and Quire

"What I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind does masterfully is examine love through the lens of Ariadne, poetically weaving in the philosophy and literary writings that inform her understanding of the world… the book is captivating, inquisitive, and provocative." —Room Magazine

"Marianne Apostolides’ latest book, I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind, interlaces an intellectually-engaging discourse on attachment and desire with an intimate picture of the primary character, Ariadne… The narrative is both agonizing and darkly humorous." —Canadian Literature