Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So

May 31, 2010
Two not unrelated challenges—being novelist Kurt Vonnegut's son and suffering episodes of schizophrenia—shape, but don't confine, this mordantly witty, slightly subversive memoir. Vonnegut (The Eden Express) weathered a scruffy childhood with his as yet obscure dad ("I'll always remember my father as the world's worst car salesman") and was hospitalized for three bouts of psychosis in his 20s. He recovered and went on to Harvard Medical School and a successful career in pediatrics—then a fourth psychotic break upended him 14 years after the first one. (Taken to the hospital where he worked, he found himself greeting colleagues while tied to a gurney.) Vonnegut vividly conveys the bizarre logic of the voices and delusions that occasionally plagued him, which he finds not much nuttier than what passes for normalcy. (He's especially incensed by the insurance bureaucracies he thinks are ruining medicine.) His father's son, he writes with a matter-of-fact absurdism—"The patient who just died lies there quietly and everyone else stops rushing around trying to do something about it"—champions misfits, and attacks the system. All his own are Vonnegut's hard-won insights into the value of a humble, useful life picked up from pieces. Photos.

September 15, 2010
Afflicted with bipolar disorder, Vonnegut penned an account about his mental illness (The Eden Express, 1975) when in his twenties. He then forsook letters for a stethoscope; his occupation as pediatric physician backgrounds Vonneguts new memoir, which relays how he has coped with his condition while holding an important job and raising a family. Amid criticisms of red tape in medical practice, Vonnegut recounts the activities, such as painting and softball, that absorbed his nonwork energies, as well as his bibulous habits. Personal crisis arrived in 1985, when he decided he was an alcoholic, suffered crack-up number four, and was put in a straitjacket and hospitalized. He describes the episode psychically as being beset with voices and a torrent of thought that all seemed as though they were actually happening. Reentering the real world, Vonnegut resumed pediatrics, fondly recalling a brief stint at a free clinic in Honduras but also reporting a divorce and remarriage. Of intrinsic interest to readers involved in mental health, Vonneguts candid recollections will also attract the literati because, yes, his father was that Vonnegut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)