Oh! Zone (ePub)

What if you lost your identity? Would you reveal that fact to strangers? What if all you ever meet are strangers?

We first see Zoenelle, a twenty-something woman, hitchhiking in the western United States in the mid '80s. As she rides with various people who snatch her from the side of the road for their own specific reasons, it is apparent that Zoenelle has no idea where she is going, in fact she has no idea who she is. She is not existentially searching for her identity; she has literally lost the memory of her personal past. Although at first glance she appears to be someone who has always lived on the fringes of society, as a free spirit with no connections, it is clear when she thinks and speaks that she is intelligent and highly educated, and that her memory of stored and retrieved knowledge is unaffected by her dissociative amnesia.

Solving the mystery of who she is and where she comes from is Zoenelle's objective. She is a mystery to herself and to the reader. Zoenelle begins to recover parts of her past and through these flashbacks of memory, clues about who she is are revealed to the reader. The other characters that she meets during her hitchhiking journey serve as catalysts to unlocking her identity.

The main character, Zoenelle, is a unique, creative, flawed, and complicated character who is bridging, bending, and breaking social norms. There is a conflicting tension between Zoenelle's logical reasoning of how the natural world works and the gender-biased, emotional mythmaking, societal world which she has difficulty understanding. Many viewers will relate to her journey and the message that individual human happiness is not determined by, and may be in direct conflict with, socio-cultural and socio-religious factors. Zoenelle is a scientist and inventor of a DNA replicating technique, so there is a brief peek into the world of scientific discovery and the individual inventor suppressed by corporate interests, as well as the introduction of a possible motive for Zoenelle's current amnesiac condition.

The flashback puzzle pieces of her past form a parallel narrative thread from her childhood with a single mother, younger brother, and grandmother to the traumatic moment that initiates her disconnect from the world. During graduate school at Cornell University, an unplanned pregnancy propels Zoenelle into a marriage of expediency. When her husband's sister comes to stay with them to help take care of the baby, all their lives change unexpectedly. Zoenelle faces court proceedings, dismissal from the graduate program and a devastating loss.

Mystery, romance, social issues, science, and philosophy—what it's like to be cut off from the familiar connections that support you, to be on your own, relying on strangers, creating a new identity for each new situation—it will be a fascinating trip!