A Stranger Comes to Town (excerpt)

The following excerpt is from Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s novel A Stranger Comes to Town, which released from EastOver Press in October 2025. In this novel, after being found on a sidewalk, knocked down by a bicycle on Columbus Avenue one block from New York’s Central Park, Joe Marzino remembers nothing, not even his own name. He awakens into the world with only the clothes on his back, a throbbing pain in his left ankle, and more questions than answers.

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In bed that first night, I asked Norah about Luz. “How did we come to adopt her? I mean her in particular.” I asked her questions all the following nights too—we got into a routine we called bedtime stories.

“It was arranged before she was born. Her mother was a young Mexican girl. I wanted a girl so badly, I told you, but the doctor said it would be dangerous to get pregnant again. So we adopted her. Some people told me dealing with adopted kids can be difficult, but so far she’s great. I adore her. And so do you.”

Fine, I could believe that. She was an adorable child.

We lay quiet for a while. Did Norah expect me to make love to her that first night? Did I want to? Would it be like making love to an entirely new woman? Any woman I made love to in my present state would be an entirely new woman. What had my past been like? Lots of women? Few? Was I careless, left broken hearts behind? Or was I often the broken-hearted one? If we married fifteen years ago I couldn’t have had too much of an amorous history, could I, in my early twenties? Why on earth marry so young?

Maybe the feel of Norah’s body, the smell, the way she moved, would suddenly bring everything back—a new use for sex, as a restorer of memory. It was worth a try. But no, not just then. I was too stunned. And I had the odd feeling that any move on my part might be intrusive, as if I were a stranger unaccountably sharing her bed. On the other hand, did she suspect there was something wrong with me, I mean something additionally wrong with me, lying next to a beautiful woman, and a willing one, I could sense, yet not making a move? Sex is not something one forgets how to do. I remembered it in the abstract, not any fuck in particular. That didn’t worry me, though. It might even help me discover who I was. But we might have habits, routines, games, who knows? I didn’t make a move. I lay still and silent and soon fell asleep. 

When I woke, the window shades had been raised, and bright sunlight streamed in. I had to blink. I remembered the room from last night, but that was all: it was a room I had seen once, and sleepily. It was large and faced the street, a narrow street lined with well-kept brownstones. Respectable well-heeled people with respectable pasts. Was I one of them? Still, you could never tell. Lots of people looked respectable but weren’t, and how did I know this? From childhood, somehow. And what did respectable mean anyway? For all I knew I’d spent time in prison.

The room had two bowed windows whose paint had been stripped down to the original wood. There were two dressers with mirrors, a Turkish rug on the floor, a couple of armchairs. Where did the money for all this come from? I must check into our finances, but not quite yet. Not before I’ve gotten the lay of the land. There was a small desk with a laptop, mine or Norah’s, I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what she would use a desk for. What did she do? She could be anything, a research scientist, a rock singer, something in finance, in TV production? Opposite the bed, an open door led to what must be a bathroom—yes, I’d used it last night. Norah gave me a small flashlight so I could find my way around. 

On the way home in the cab yesterday, she’d explained that we lived on the first three floors of a brownstone. She didn’t say whether we owned or rented. If we owned it, we must have money. I almost laughed: I, a grown man, didn’t even know how much money we had, if any. Earned or inherited? A glimmer of resentment against inherited wealth shot through me, again a flash from the past. I didn’t feel like a rich kid, that I’d had a rich kid’s life. But how could I know?

If the building was ours, we had to take care of it; there’d be tenants on the other floors. A new facet of my identity: landlord! Mr. Fixit. I’d have to greet my tenants if I met them on the stairs. Did I know how to fix things? Was I “handy?” I remembered the word from somewhere, a dust mote of the past, like a mote in the eye. Did I even know how the heating system worked? Well, that could wait. It was April. By the time we’d need heat, I’d be better. Or Norah would have stowed me in some rest home. How long could I expect her to live with me as I was? I wasn’t much of a companion. It would be like taking on the care and education of another child, a large child. Another adoption. I could wash and dress myself, I was toilet trained, I could speak, but not much else. 

I glanced over at the pillow beside mine, still dented where Norah’s head had rested. Good. She wasn’t a woman who got up and immediately plumped the pillow. Ah, I was showing preferences—the start of a self! I’d keep a close watch for more such signs. Of such small stuff identity is made. I knew that. Life had not been wasted on me.

We’d slept side by side. We started out barely touching. Once I woke during the night and felt her at my back, holding me around the chest. I would have liked to hold her too, but she was still a stranger. It would be easier to fuck a stranger than to cuddle up with her in the middle of the night. Even with no memory I knew that too. Very soon we’d have to make love. She would want to, at least I hoped so. I hoped that was a happy part of our marriage. Perhaps at the first touch it would all come back to me, what we liked, what we did. That was part of the body’s memory, not the mind’s. My body would know what gave us pleasure. Or was she the sort of woman who would tell me? The pain of not knowing these things gripped like a fierce muscle cramp. And then panic. What would I do from now on? How would I live? The enormity of what was lost spread over me, and I curled back under the covers. Not only my loss but theirs too, Norah’s, the kids’. What could it be like to live with a husband or father who had no idea who he was, what he might have done or left undone. In some way their loss was as bad as mine. But at the moment I could focus only on myself.

What else did Norah and I do together? Did she run too? It was hard enough to believe I was a runner, with my ankle still throbbing, though more mildly than yesterday. She was in good shape, lean and lithe. Did we go to movies, restaurants? Did we follow tennis or baseball?

At last I forced myself out of bed but didn’t know what to do next. My habits were gone. Did I take a shower first, or have a cup of coffee, or put on my shorts and go out for a run? Of course I couldn’t do that now, with my ankle wrapped up. The cane leaned against a window, waiting for me like a patient friend. And then? Go to work? Check my phone? Read the paper? If I was an actor, as Norah claimed (unless it was a cruel joke), did I go to rehearsals? 

I found a robe and went downstairs. Aside from Norah, dressed and in the kitchen drinking coffee, the house felt empty. She looked up questioningly, curiously, as if maybe the night had restored my memory and all was as it had been. I gave a tiny shake of my head, and she understood. She was still caretaker. The boys were at school, she explained, and she’d already dropped Luz at preschool. She’d usually be on her way to work now, she explained, but she’d taken a few days off to help me out.

“I didn’t want to leave you alone in an empty house and not knowing anything. I love you. I suppose you’ve forgotten that too.”

I had quite forgotten. I was getting a hint of what she was like. Tough-minded, often with an edge of sarcasm, not easily panicked. Those first few moments of the hospital visit were the only time, post-accident, that I’d seen her break down. I couldn’t know about before. Generous. Efficient. Affectionate but firm with the children.

“What is the work you didn’t go to?”

“I’m a research librarian at NYU. My specialty is the history of theater. I’ve been doing it for about eight years. I took a short leave after Luz was born, but I went back to full time pretty quickly.”

“I don’t know anything about you. I think I might fall in love with you. And how convenient. We’re already living together.”

“That’s the kind of thing you used to say. You could be quite charming.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Meanwhile, I don’t know how to … proceed. I mean, what do I usually do first thing in the morning?”

“Pee, like everyone. They don’t do that in books or movies, but trust me.”

“Thanks, there are still a few things I know.”

She said I went out to run most mornings, came home carrying a newspaper, showered, then read the Times in the living room. “At least on weekends. I usually leave while you’re running. Monday was unusual. You went out to run in the afternoon because you had a script to read in the morning. You’d auditioned for a play.” She poured me a cup of coffee. “Black, no sugar.”

“Thanks. I guess I didn’t get the part.”

“You did, as a matter of fact. They called and left a message while I was with you in the hospital. Vince told them you’d had an accident and were in the hospital. They were sorry, but they needed someone right away. It was a new play, I can’t remember the details.”

“It doesn’t matter. So I read the paper every day? Does that mean I’m a serious person?”

“Well, you devoted enough time to it. You read the editorials and checked the baseball scores and followed tennis. And of course the theater and movie reviews. You could sit with that paper for an hour or more. Sometimes I thought you were dreaming. Or hiding.”

“Sounds reasonable. I have no idea what’s going on, though. Are we in the midst of a war?”

“Nothing you’d call a major war, at least not here. But we have troops all over the place, Afghanistan for quite a while, Syria, Somalia. It’s hard to keep up, frankly. I worry about what will be going on when Vince reaches eighteen.”

That was a worry I could postpone for a while. I drank the coffee and helped myself to a croissant from a bowl on the table. “Look, I want to take a shower and shave, then let’s talk.”

“Sure. There’s a lot to tell you, but one thing in particular can’t wait.”

Before I went back downstairs, I walked around. First I peered into the boys’ rooms. The spaces looked as I’d expect, posters of athletes taped to the walls, computers on desks, crumpled socks peeking out from under the beds. A pile of boxed games, Monopoly among them, a few jigsaw puzzles, a chess set. Vince’s? Kevin seemed more the type. I studied the bookshelf, which they shared: Call of the Wild, White Fang—which was the Jack London fan?—piles of school papers, and on what must have been Kevin’s pillow, a ragged Curious George—I remembered him. I’m not sure what I was looking for. I just wanted a better sense of who they were, but these days that could only be found on the computers, and I wasn’t about to invade their privacy.

I found a room on the third floor that looked like a study, mine, I think—there were old scripts and tapes labeled Crime City with dates. But it also held an ironing board, some folding chairs piled in a corner, and a closet with taped cartons. An ordinary house. Where were my secrets? Did I have secrets? Surely. Everyone did.

When I came back down, Norah poured us both more coffee and sat beside me at the kitchen table. “You need to know about this, Joe, for when you go back to work.” She unfolded a newspaper clipping. But before I had a chance to read it, the phone rang.

She leaped up to answer. “Yes. Was it for tomorrow? … I’m afraid he won’t be able to make it. He had an accident near the park and sprained his ankle … No, not too bad. I’ll ask him to call and reschedule when he can get around better. Sorry. Give my best to Howard.”

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Our lawyer’s office. To confirm an appointment you had for tomorrow. I told them you couldn’t make it.” 

“What was it about?”

“I can’t say. Something you needed to discuss, I guess.”

She lowered her eyes, and even without a memory I could see she was lying.

“You can tell me. Anything serious? Money?”

“I told you, I don’t know,” she snapped. “No money problems that I’m aware of. Now please look at this. It’s important. About work.”

Work. What sort of work could I return to with no memory? If I was really an actor, I was finished. Could I memorize a script? If I were some kind of scientist or mechanic I might still remember how to do my work. Muscle memory, again. Scientific knowledge would most likely remain somewhere or other in the brain. Probably the same with musicians or computer wizards.

The clipping read, “Actor Joe Marzino, 37, star of Crime City, was knocked down by a bicycle on Columbus Avenue near 77th Street yesterday afternoon and was taken to the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital, where doctors found a sprained ankle but no major injuries. The cyclist, Jose Rivera, 26, a pizza delivery man, was thrown over the handlebars and taken to the same hospital in critical condition. The accident is one of a growing number involving pedestrians and cyclists, which the mayor has been vocal about. Police blame the increase on electric bicycles used for deliveries. Transportation Alternatives says …”

So I was wrong about Norah and the kids spreading the word about my accident. Good, I wouldn’t have wanted a family that broadcast our private affairs. Even this much publicity was too much.

And I really was an actor. She hadn’t been kidding. Yes, the Actors’ Equity card in the wallet.

“Can’t you remember anything about the accident?

“No. Tell me.”

“It was Monday around four. You were coming home from jogging in the park. Not your usual time, as I told you. The police say the guy on the bike was going in the wrong direction in the bike lane.”

“I’ve always thought those bike lanes were dangerous. Lots of the bikers go in the wrong direction.”

“Well, that’s a memory,” she said with ironic good cheer. “Maybe you’re recovering.”

“I remember lots of irrelevant things. Just not who I am or my life. What happened to him, the biker?”

She paused. “You were brought to the hospital at the same time. He didn’t make it.”

“You mean he died?”

“Yes. It was awful. His family was in the emergency room in a cubicle right opposite yours. They took him off for surgery right away, before they even looked in on you. The family was crying. I felt so bad for them. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. Or maybe they’d removed it. I tried to go over to talk to them, but I lost my nerve. They were talking Spanish very fast, and I couldn’t follow.”

“If I hadn’t come by at just that moment …”

“It wasn’t your fault. He was the one going the wrong way. You could have been killed. You were lucky. He flew over the handle bars and landed on his head. You lost your memory. He lost his life.”

I lost my life, too, I wanted to correct her. But it was not the same thing; I was a living, breathing man with a minimal identity. At least the cyclist’s family knew what they’d lost.

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Decorating Real Life: An Interview with Lynne Sharon Schwartz by Geoff Graser 

Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s writing career has spanned more than four decades. The octogenarian’s latest novel A Stranger Comes to Town (October 28, 2025, Eastover Press) is sharp as ever. Schwartz introduces us to Joe Marzino. The protagonist is essentially born anew when he’s hit by a bicyclist and awakens with amnesia. A stranger to even himself, Joe soon meets his wife and children as if for the first time. Fortunately, Joe is able to remember lines to scripts, because he’s a professional actor who must still help support his family in Manhattan.

With her characteristic wryness and wisdom, Schwartz leads us on an unforgettable journey of self-discovery, probing the universal questions of how we all reinvent our past and ourselves. I recently corresponded with Schwartz about her exploration into the fallibility of memory, her decision to write from a male POV, and her career longevity.

Geoff Graser: What inspired A Stranger Comes to Town and its explorations into identity?

Lynne Sharon-Schwartz: I began writing A Stranger Comes to Town at the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. I’d just had a collection of essays published, called My Life at the Wheel, and normally I might have taken a short break and written reviews or something simple. I was also teaching at the time. But when I realized how limited our lives were going to be, and for who knows how long, I decided the best thing would be to have something substantial that I could get involved in. I can’t remember right now how the idea came to me; in fact I didn’t have a plan for the book; it just took shape as it went along. I wrote the first scene, when Joe, the protagonist, finds himself in the hospital, and just let it fly from there, so to speak. I never had a fully worked out plan.

GG: The protagonist Joe Marzino has been hit by a bike and left with amnesia after the accident. Joe is well aware of the trope of the amnesiac, and notes that in movies it’s mostly male characters depicted in this condition. How did you arrive at telling this story with a male protagonist? 

LSS: I can’t remember coming to a decision about that. Most of my other novels have women protagonists, or center around a family. Now that I think of it, I can’t remember any female protagonists in novels or films who have amnesia. But surely there must be some.  Joe just came naturally to me, appeared in my plans as a man, insofar as I had any plans. The novel moved along very slowly, in the writing, that is, and I often found myself wondering what might happen next. Of course all of this was influenced by the pandemic going on around me, around everyone. It was a time of confusion and chaos, publicly and privately, and the novel simply moved from episode to episode as the growing plot demanded. Most of my other novels have more of a plan behind them, but this one, in the writing, sort of reflected the chaos and unpredictability of what we were living through. It was something for me to hang on to for some stability amidst the uncertainty of the times.

GG: One theme revolves around the question of how well one can really know themselves. How did an acting career for your protagonist Joe work as a vehicle for this theme and others you wanted to explore?

LSS: I don’t remember now how I decided to make him an actor, but once I got started on that path it was obviously the right one for this character. After all, he is in a position where he’s acting, even with his family. That is, his life in addition to his work, has become a kind of performance in which elements from the past are mysteries he has to solve in order to get his identity back. And creating the character he plays on TV, the detective, Skellings, I had a nice opportunity to do some doubling, or think of ways they are alike or not alike. I also was a devoted fan of Law and Order on TV, so this gave me a chance to use some of what I picked up from my hours of watching. Like many others, I was fascinated by the show although I’m not a big TV watcher otherwise. But once I made Joe an actor, I found so many ways to draw parallels between him and his character, which made for fun and contrasts in the writing and also, I hope, in the reading. The two characters, the “real” one, Joe, and the TV one, Skellings, kind of feed off each other, and I enjoyed thinking of ways to bring them together, to make them alike and also to contrast them.

GG: Joe is disappointed when he learns about many of his past actions, including the willed forgetting of a family loss as a young boy. What interests you most about playing with the idea of memory and what the unconscious holds onto and what it lets go?

LSS: Joe has not only forgotten the ordinary aspects of life, his life, that is, as well as the extraordinary ones. As the story goes on, and as he begins to recover memories, he has to wonder why he has forgotten certain things; these turn out to be traumatic events, mostly, such as the death of his father, or his own betrayal of his twin sister, or a brief sexual encounter with a babysitter that results in a child that Joe and his wife adopt. The reader, I hope, begins to look at his or her own life in that way—e.g., why have I forgotten such and such, which was so important, while I remember trivial things? Sometimes the trivial things we remember lead us back to major events and themes in our lives that for one reason or another (for self-protection, maybe?) we would rather forget. They put us in a light we would rather not see by, illuminate dark corners better left forgotten; the self does this to protect itself, to maintain a notion of selfhood we find more acceptable. This is what Joe finds gradually, and of course it shocks and disturbs him. But it also brings him some good memories, such as realizing he’s been a good father and feeling pleased about his children, whom he didn’t even realize at first that he had!

GG: How do you see A Stranger Comes to Town in dialogue with your other books?

LSS: I’ve written so many novels that that is hard to answer. In most of them, the characters’ bad actions or mistakes are happening on the page, as we read. So, as readers we experience them in the same time frame as the characters. In a few novels shocking events occur as we read, and we experience them along with the characters. Our conception of who the characters are or what they are capable of comes as we move from page to page. But it’s not really an intellectual process—it’s life happening as it does to all of us. The past becomes the present in a more natural way than it does for Joe in A 

Stranger Comes to Town,

GG: What surprises did you encounter when writing this book? Were there any major changes between its conception or your first draft and the published novel?

LSS: Yes, along with Joe I had to accept or be astonished at what I found he was capable of. This wouldn’t happen to ordinary people without amnesia. After the first draft I went back to correct or make clear elements that were mysterious to me in earlier versions.

GG: You’ve now published thirty books. Wow! How have you maintained the energy to continue writing over the years? Have you ever encountered writers block? If so, how do you get around it?

LSS: I didn’t use to have writers’ block when I was younger and starting out. But I guess as I use up material from my inner life, or sometimes from experience, I’m left with less to be explored. My early novels drew on my life but to a lesser degree than I think people imagine. Real life can be tedious at times; we have to decorate it to make it more exciting or eventful. As a matter of fact, a few of those 30 books, besides including short story collections, are anthologies I put together: one about translation; one collecting critical writings about the author W.G. Sebald; a few translations of Italian children’s books; and one a translation of an Italian Holocaust memoir.

GG: Would you like to add anything else I haven’t asked about?

LSS: No, thanks, I think I’ve said enough. Except I do regret the loss of some stories I wrote as a child, and which have an innocence and wonder about them that one cannot retain as an adult. I guess they got thrown out with other childhood things.  

Interviewer Bio

Geoff Graser is a writer/editor whose home base is Rochester, New York, though he currently lives in Brazil. His writing and interviews have appeared in Narratively, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, World Literature Today, Cleaver Magazine, Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature, and other publications. He holds an MA in journalism from Syracuse University and an MFA in creative writing from Bennington College.