Unflinching account of mental illness in a family and how treatment must be improved.
Great for fans of Anna Berry’s Unhinged, Gabrielle Pelicci’s All This Healing is Killing Me.
MEMOIR
My Life with Crazy: Learning to
Thrive While Coping with Mentally
Ill Family Members
Nan Walker | Balboa Press
336p, trade paper, $20.99, ISBN 978-1-982-25850-4
This intimate, heartening examination of the experience of facing mental illness in one’s family lives up to its author’s promise of not wanting to write a “misery memoir”—”nobody needs to hear anybody else complain at length,” she notes. Yes, My Life With Crazy offers a clear-eyed, often wrenching account of a wife and mother’s heartache as her husband and one of her sons both exhibit increasingly erratic behavior, resist medical expertise and diagnoses, and become dangers to themselves and others. But Walker also focuses on what family members in such circumstances need to understand about our nation’s brittle, confounding system for mental health care, including urgent concerns like why people with mental illness can have a surprisingly easy time buying guns or why HIPAA makes it so hard for parents to understand their children’s issues.
She also urges readers to practice self-care and compassion, not blaming themselves when things go wrong or when facing hard choices like whether to seek the institutionalization of a family member—a process that, as she makes clear throughout, is as difficult as purchasing a firearm is easy. The title itself reflects her penchant for self-forgiveness; acknowledging objections to the term “crazy,” she writes “I just couldn’t think of a more apt word with which to describe twenty-five years of my life.” She describes those years with unflinching directness, writing of gut-churning incidents, of receiving hundreds of threatening messages from her son, and of shocking quirks of law: “Who knew it is illegal for a Mom to change her own locks?”
In the book’s helpful final sections, she profiles potential changemakers, lays out practical suggestions that could improve many lives, and calls for kindness and understanding, not just for those living with mental illness, but for the families that try desperately to care for them in a broken system.
Cover: A | Design & typography: A | Illustrations: – Editing: A- | Marketing copy: B