A Kind of Forgery

By Brian Dale Babiak MD

A KIND OF FORGERY
A Novel
For Robert Aldridge, once a gifted jazz pianist, memory has become a broken instrument. For his daughter Margaret, it's a part she must learn-whether or not it belongs to her.

Each Sunday, Margaret Hollis visits her father at Willowbrook Memory Care, bracing herself for the steady erosion of his mind. But one afternoon, his face lights with a rare affection and he calls her "ma ch rie." Only he isn't seeing Margaret-he's mistaking her for Naomi, the estranged half-sister Margaret has resented all her life. Instead of correcting him, Margaret makes a radical choice: she becomes Naomi.

What begins as a single merciful deception spirals into a full-scale performance. Margaret studies Naomi's biography, takes jazz piano lessons, even rehearses the phrases of a life not her own. For the first time, she feels the warmth of a father's love-borrowed, but intoxicating. Yet when the real Naomi, a renowned music therapist, returns, Margaret's fragile construct begins to fracture. Sister against sister, truth against comfort, they must decide: can counterfeit love, offered with genuine intent, become its own kind of truth?

With prose that captures the cold antiseptic corridors of the care facility and the tremor of a remembered chord under fading fingers, A Kind of Forgery is a piercing exploration of memory, performance, and the ethics of care. It asks a question that will linger long after the last page: what matters more-the facts of our identity, or the love we are able to give?

For readers of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, Lisa Genova's Still Alice, and Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, this is a novel for anyone who has wondered whether compassion can sometimes matter more than truth.

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Brian Dale Babiak, MD brings four decades of psychiatric practice to contemporary literary fiction, transforming clinical expertise into what he calls the Henry James 2.0 Project-an ambitious reinvention of psychological realism for the age of neuroscience, trauma theory, and family systems psychology.

If Henry James mapped the architecture of consciousness, Babiak reveals its fragility: how memory falters, how identity bends under pressure, how love survives through performance as much as truth.

A Kind of Forgery is the second novel in the Henry James 2.0 project, following The Familiar System. Together, these works establish Babiak as a major voice in diagnostic fiction: literature that exposes the hidden systems shaping our most intimate lives, and asks how we might improvise new truths from their ruins.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FMQSSBHM
• ISBN13: 9798298512190
• Release Date: August 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 252 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"