Making sense of madness
The Edge of Every Day
Marin Sardy’s mother talked often about the universe. How it existed in two streams. One stream was the everyday world we can see and the other exists inside of us — the realm of the imagination and spirit. The Earth, she said, contained a special force that sorted people “according to where we belong.” Sometimes her beliefs propelled her to cover the ends of their television antennas with balls of aluminum foil to protect her children from radiation. At other times, Sardy’s mother covered her face with bandanas so that only her eyes were visible.
Sardy grew up with these dueling realities. There was the life of school, friends, and gymnastics practice outside of her house in Anchorage, Alaska. And then there was life inside, with her mother, who was mentally ill. Sardy tried to keep the two realities separate, but the stress was profound.
“The months when my mother didn’t seem to eat anything at all except cheddar cheese and green onions. She would stand in the kitchen over a cutting board and take a bite of one, then the other,” Sardy writes in “Strange Things I Have Encountered,” the first chapter of her experimental, essayistic memoir, The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia, (Pantheon Books, 289 pages, $25.95).
The chapter is composed of fragmented memories, experiences, and observations that might seem unnervingly random to a reader who has never been intimately connected to madness. When she was a young child, it wasn’t always clear to Sardy where her own thoughts ended and her mother’s delusions began.
“Eclipses of my mind, which happen at times for no apparent reason. I am walking and then I am falling. But I am not falling,” she writes. “I have gone black for a fraction of a second, and in that time I lost my sense of my position in space. Then I become afraid that at any moment I will pass out and fall.”
Sardy effectively conveys how schizophrenia upends the life of the sufferers and those of most everyone who loves them. Her mother was deeply paranoid — of radiation, thieving relatives, the untrustworthy tectonic plates she believed were shifting under her feet. And as she tells it, Sardy had to keep so much inside of herself that it was difficult to feel connected to other people. Because she couldn’t depend on her mother for guidance or stability, every day came with a sense of risk.
She wrote a memoir because she wanted to integrate the inside and the outside of her house, so to speak. But the story Sardy tells is larger than her experience with her mother. Sardy’s younger brother, Tom, developed symptoms of schizophrenia and became homeless when he was in his 20s. She reveals early in the book that Tom is now dead and then arcs a roving series of chapters toward the moment of his demise. Her sometimes disjointed prose reflects the way a schizophrenic’s mind works, as well as her own interior monologue. She said that her thoughts are quick and associative, and a linear approach didn’t seem the right way to convey her experiences in the book.
Sardy reads from The Edge of Every Day on Wednesday, June 26, at Collected Works Bookstore.
Though she grew up in Alaska and now lives in Arizona, Sardy has roots in New Mexico. Her grandparents owned the Circle Diamond Ranch near Roswell. Her grandfather’s business interests brought him from Chicago to the oil fields of the desert Southwest, and then, in the 1960s, to the high-rises of Los Angeles as the CEO of the Atlantic Richfield oil company, known as ARCO. Her mother lived on family money for years until it ran out. Sardy and her mother have both lived in Santa Fe; Sardy was the editor of Santa Fean magazine in 2009, when she was in her early 30s. She left to earn a graduate degree in nonfiction writing at Columbia University.
“I went there thinking I was going to write about more external things, but every time I sat down, I just wound up writing about schizophrenia,” she said. At that time, her brother was still alive, so although she wrote essays about him, she did not intend to make him such a large focus of her memoir. “If he was going to come back indoors and try to recover from schizophrenia to whatever degree he could, I didn’t want to have