Bainbridge Island author Sarah Townsend will visit Eagle Harbor Book Company at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 18 to discuss her new memoir, “Setting the Wire.”

The book is a memoir of postpartum psychosis and a meditation on containment: what we hold and what holds us together.

A lyric exploration of motherhood, mental illness, and familial ties, Townsend’s tale weaves together personal anecdote, film, music, visual art, and psychology.

“Setting the Wire” has been called “a visceral reflection on the experience of fragmentation as a young psychotherapist and new mother.”

Townsend’s essays have appeared in The Writer in the World and Pitkin Review. A coauthored paper with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl serves as a chapter in “Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Writing Women’s Lives.”

She received her MFA in creative writing from Goddard College, her master’s degree in counseling psychology from Northwestern University, and is a graduate of the College of Letters at Wesleyan University.

She writes, teaches, and practices psychotherapy in and around Seattle.