Retrovision
What if memories could testify?
A novel by Robert W. Termanini, MD
A work of upmarket literary suspense about a neurosurgeon who, on the night his lover is murdered, preserves not her life but the architecture of her dying mind — and who, twelve years later, grafts that tissue into his own daughter to save her. The child lives, and begins to carry a sensory record of a death she never witnessed, of a woman she never met.
“The medicine is real. The only fiction is that it happened to these people.”
Robert W. Termanini, MD
“What must the child pay for the parent’s sin?”
A medical doctor and neuroscientist. RETROVISION is his debut novel.
Retrovision
Upmarket Literary Suspense
"What if the only living witness to a murder was never there?"
In 1979, neurosurgeon Samuel Becker finds Marta Christensen, the young Danish woman who had nursed his dying mother and whom he has loved in secret, bleeding to death in his family’s greenhouse after an attack no one else witnesses. In the aftermath, with the Becker estate destroyed, Samuel does what no physician should. He removes and preserves a small sample of Marta’s cortical tissue. It violates every ethical line he has sworn to hold, and he does it anyway, unwilling to let her vanish completely, keeping the one part of her that might still hold who she was.
Twelve years later, when his daughter Amelia is six, Samuel discovers a high-grade glioma at the left temporal-parietal junction of her brain. He performs the resection himself. In the moment when her survival narrows to an impossible choice, he grafts Marta’s preserved tissue into the surgical bed. The procedure is unprecedented, unauthorized, and undocumented. Amelia lives.
After the surgery, Amelia begins producing sensory fragments connected to a night she could not possibly have witnessed. A greenhouse she has never entered. The pressure of a hand at her throat. A Danish word for beloved she has never been taught. The case has been closed for a decade. With her testimony, it begins to come apart, and so does Samuel.
The Book
RETROVISION is a multigenerational work of upmarket literary suspense about what we save, what we lose in the saving, and what the body keeps after the mind has finished forgetting. It is grounded in clinical realism, surgical anatomy, and the moral pressure of medicine, and built as a slow burn in which the reader knows the killer long before the lawyers do. The medicine in it is not science fiction. The story is.
For Agents & Editors
The full manuscript, a two-page synopsis, and the property’s identity and adaptation materials are available on request to qualified literary agents, editors, and rights professionals.
Request Materials"I have resurrected fragments of a dead woman's mind inside my daughter."
From the Opening Pages
Chapter One — The Eloquent Cortex · October 14, 1979
His body understood before his mind did. Samuel Becker was driving north on the Edens, rain coming off the windshield faster than the wipers could clear it, when somewhere past the Lake Forest exit his pulse changed without instruction. He felt it in the throat first, then the sternum, then the narrowing cone of his vision. The body’s older mathematics, solving for danger before reason had finished naming it.
He had told himself he was going back to apologize, and he had believed it for most of the drive. In the inside pocket of his coat, against his chest, the field syringe rode where it had ridden for eleven days. He did not think about that either, which was its own kind of thinking. The serum in the barrel had a window. Minutes, not hours, between a heart’s last competent beat and the moment the tissue it fed began to forget itself. He had spent eleven days calling the window theoretical. He was driving toward it at eighty miles an hour and calling the drive an apology.
When he turned onto the private road, the rain had dropped from violence to saturation. The house rose ahead in pieces. Gables. Chimney. Black windows. The greenhouse fixed to the east wing like a second anatomy no one had managed to remove. The house was dark. Fully dark. At this hour there should have been one of them awake, the landing at least. Instead the structure sat black against the ridge, and the greenhouse glass flashed only when lightning crossed it.
Two weeks earlier, soil drying on the heel of one hand, Marta had stood beneath the grow lights and told him someone was watching the house. I see footprints where no one walks. He had told her she was adjusting to a new country and a strange house. Then he had kissed the inside of her wrist and told her no one was coming.
He got out into the rain. The mud found him first. Deep prints leading toward the kitchen door, driven hard at the heel. Not Frank’s tread, not Marta’s quick crossings between the greenhouse and the pantry. Someone had come here with weight and with purpose.
If unearthing the truth requires a mythic violation of a child’s bodily autonomy, is it justice, or is it just another crime?
Speaking
“What does it cost a person to speak the truth out loud, and what does it cost them to stay silent? It is the question beneath my fiction, my medicine, and every room I have spoken in.”
I speak to audiences who want intellectual depth delivered with emotional intelligence and narrative force. I have developed a substantial body of public speaking material across medicine, neuroscience, mental health, and human behavior.
Drawing from expertise in medicine, neuroscience, human behavior, and a literary engagement with the human condition, my talks move between scientific insight and human story. They are written for audiences who do not want to choose between rigor and accessibility, and who would rather leave a room thinking than leave it cheered.
Signature Talks
- The Brain as Storyteller: memory, narrative, and the architecture of identity.
- Inherited Trauma and the Body as Archive.
- Forensic Truth and the Architecture of Secrecy.
- The Neuroscience of Grief: what loss does to the architecture of memory.
- Why Physicians Read Fiction, and Why Fiction Reads Physicians.
- The Cognitive Science of Suicide Prevention.
- Physician Suicide, Burnout, and the Long Work of Staying in the Room.
- Attention, Time Blindness, and the ADHD Brain: what the neuroscience actually says.
Available for Booking
Available for universities, medical institutions, literary festivals, professional conferences, and healthcare, technology, and knowledge-sector audiences. Topics can be adapted for keynote lectures, moderated conversations, panels, workshops, and institutional events.
Inquire for BookingPress & Media
"I write for readers who want the crime solved, but also need to know what the crime did to everyone who lived."
Current Work
In Submission
RETROVISION
What if memories could testify?
RETROVISION is a 98,000-word work of upmarket literary suspense, currently with literary agents. Press materials for RETROVISION are available for advance coverage and interview requests.
Available materials on request include the full manuscript, one-page and two-page synopses, an editorial synopsis, author photographs, biographical material in three lengths, and a one-page property summary suitable for editorial assignment briefs.
Request RETROVISION Press MaterialsFeatured Book
#1 Amazon Kindle Bestseller — February 3, 2024
The Gifts of Pain, Volume 1
Daily Stories, Reflections, and Prompts to Find Hope and Healing in Adversity
“A valuable daily resource for anyone seeking comfort, strength, and wisdom as they navigate life’s hardest challenges.”
A collection of real-life stories from 31 authors of diverse backgrounds, using Elayna Fernández’s S.T.O.R.Y. System to transform painful experience into practical tools for growth and change.
Contribution
Chapter 7 — “From Impossible to I’m Possible”
Reached #1 simultaneously in Personal Transformation, Journaling, and Journal Writing Self-Help on launch day.
View on Amazon →Broadcast Coverage
Syndicated across more than 100 broadcast affiliates nationwide, including FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, and CW stations, plus AP News and regional and international press.
In Progress
Neural Rhythms and Mind Mechanics: The Academic Encyclopedia of Brainwave Entrainment
Full manuscript complete, in preparation for academic press submission.
For Journalists
Robert W. Termanini, MD is available for interviews on the following subjects:
- →The neuroscience of memory and the architecture of experience.
- →Inherited trauma and the body as archive.
- →The forensic and ethical territory at the intersection of medicine and law.
- →The cognitive foundations of narrative and the craft of fiction.
- →Medical ethics and the moral demands of clinical practice.
- →The mind under threat: what neuroscience has taught us about violence, witness, and recovery.
- →Why a physician writes fiction.
Press Resources
High-resolution press photographs, biography in short, medium, and long forms, and a one-page property summary are available on request.
Request Press KitProfessional Links
Contact
Agents, Editors & Rights
For agents, editors, foreign rights, adaptation, press, speaking, and professional inquiries:
robert@drtermanini.comA Note on Correspondence
I read every message that reaches me directly and answer what I can. Response times are typically five to seven days. I am not currently able to respond to unsolicited manuscript submissions or blurb requests. Inquiries sent to the address above are read with care.
Media on deadline: Journalists with a publication or broadcast deadline should note the deadline in the subject line. Time-sensitive press inquiries receive priority response.