The Art of Misdiagnosis

September 1, 2017
A novelist, poet, and writing teacher mourns the tragic loss of her tormented mother.In this raw memoir, Brandeis (The Selfless Bliss of the Body, 2017, etc.) begins with her 70-year-old mother Arlene's suicide in 2009, which coincided with the birth of her son Asher. Desperate for answers, she and her sister fruitlessly scoured their mother's bedroom, which, much like the woman herself, appeared "lovely and elegant on the surface, total chaos underneath." The author's reality soon became even more complex: she wrestled with the grief of her mother's sudden death, processed her complicated history of paranoia, suspicion, and delusions, and nurtured her newborn. This frustration bleeds into the text as Brandeis recounts episodes where her mother's inexplicable accusations wreaked havoc on her pregnancy and her marriage. The author then reveals her mother's history of psychosis, which seemed to stem from the author's pregnancies, with which Arlene became obsessed. The book's title comes from a documentary her mother, an artist, was producing about the rare inherited illnesses she believed plagued the family. Her daughter was skeptical, however, believing the film to be a "noble, misguided project." Whether they were psychosomatically induced or not, Arlene attested that the illnesses had been repeatedly dismissed or misdiagnosed by the medical community; even the author herself admits to suffering, as a teenager, from a combination of malingering and factitious disorder. Urged by her therapist, Brandeis penned letters to her deceased mother to hopefully exorcise the demons haunting her and to transfer unexpressed feelings about their complex relationship into words. These resonant missives combine with exchanged emails, transcripts from her mother's documentary, and evocative, retrospective narration detailing the author's own medical maladies, youthful memories, and her love-hate relationship with a woman she seemed to empathize with in hindsight. Brandeis' emotional struggle to truly understand her mother is searing and poignant. "I am aching to understand you now," she writes, "to figure out your story, the path that led to your unraveling." A uniquely graceful, gorgeously written and composed collage of grief, misunderstanding, love, and an attempt at familial closure through art and prose.

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Starred review from October 1, 2017
Not many books begin with a line as arresting as After my mom hangs herself, I become Nancy Drew. But not many authors write as hauntingly as Brandeis (Delta Girls, 2010) or live through such a disturbing tragedy. In 2009, just one week after Brandeis gives birth, her delusional mother commits suicide in a parking garage closet. In this memoir named after a documentary her mom was producing, she gives heartbreaking, sometimes creepy, details. For example, she notes that her mother's black pants smell like urine and that she was wearing a tiger-striped bra ( this touches me, somehow, this touch of wildness she carried beneath her clothes ). As Brandeis switches back and forth in time, she recalls 1994, when her mother attacked her father with a stun gun to try to give him a heart attack. Her parents didn't speak for three years. How does Brandeis wrap up this tale of grief? She remarks that the Mayans believed suicide by hanging was an honorable way to die, notes that more than 800,000 people worldwide kill themselves each year, and gives suicide-prevention resources. Like other memoirs about mental illness and suicide, Brandeis' is upsetting. But with its warts-and-all honesty about flawed people, including the author, it is also illuminating and redeeming.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)