Psychotherapist Grace Harmon admits to her teacher, a secretive and mysterious man, that the only remaining enthusiasm in her life is for the music of Mozart. She expects him to analyze her obsession and destroy it, but instead he offers to send her back in time to meet her idol. His promise stimulates a flood of fantasy in Grace as she prepares to make the trip. Her discussion of these fantasies helps her discover how her obsession with Mozart reflects her deepest questions about life.
   The author uses the stages of immediacy as discussed by Søren Kierkegaard in Either/Or—namely, longing (personified by Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro), searching (represented by Papageno in The Magic Flute), and finding (Don Giovanni). Each of these stages is relevant to Grace’s search for the real Mozart, and ultimately to her renewed enthusiasm for life.

Joyce T. Stafford, a graduate of the State University of New York at Bing-hamton and Marywood College, is a psychotherapist and marriage counselor in private practice. She has four children and lives with her husband in Vestal, New York. Mozart and Me is her first novel.