Tag: mental health

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Stephanie3 Comments

I needed a celebrity memoir for the 2023 Popsugar Reading Challenge, and what do you know, on my TBR was I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy (Simon & Schuster, 2021). Jennette is best known for playing Sam Puckett on the Nickelodeon show iCarly, but she’s also a talented writer. I started learning of her toxic relationship with her mother at the beginning of the pandemic, when an article she’d written made the rounds, and, having watched all of iCarly with my son and now my daughter, I was horrified. I knew I’d eventually want to read her memoir, but the wait lists at my library were miles long, so I was prepared to be patient. However, I got lucky, and the book pulled me in so strongly that I finished it in hours. Drop whatever you’re currently reading and get a copy of this book. NOW.

Jennette McCurdy was raised by a toxic narcissist mother who physically, emotionally, and sexually abused her her entire childhood. Mother Debra was a cancer survivor and often used this status to gain favors and sympathy from everyone around her. The book opens on a scene where she’s going through the nightly ritual of making her children watch her goodbye video she had recorded for them when she wasn’t expected to survive, and criticizing their behavior on the screen (never mind that they were all younger and already traumatized). Acting had been Debra’s dream, never Jennette’s, and she pushed her daughter into it and began to live vicariously through her. Jennette, already feeling responsible for managing her mother’s emotions from her preschool years, does her best to smile through the auditions and performances that she hates to keep her mother happy.

As Jennette grows, her mother teaches her to have an eating disorder in order to stay small, so she can play younger roles, since Jennette’s work is paying the family’s bills. This, combined with the stress of a career as a child AND managing her narcissist mother’s emotions, has terrible effects on Jennette’s mental health, and the constant criticism and stress of working in Hollywood only add to it all. When Debra’s cancer returns and ends her life, Jennette, left without the ability to manage any of her emotions and without the knowledge of who she is without her mother, spirals.

Every chapter of this book will reach out and grip you by the throat, then punch you in the gut, then tear your heart out and stomp it flat. The devastation that Jennette’s mother wreaked upon her life easily explains the provocative title (my daughter saw the title and was shocked; I simply explained to her that not everyone is lucky enough to have parents that treat them well, that some kids have parents who hurt them, and she understood and was sad). I absolutely blew through this masterpiece of a book, but I spent the entire time just devastated for Jennette. We watch a lot of iCarly around here, and it hurts me to know not only what she was going through when filming those scenes, but that she didn’t even want to be there in the first place. I’m so sad for everything Jennette McCurdy has suffered.

I’m also furious at Hollywood, like ragingly burn-it-all-the-fuck-down, STOP-USING-CHILDREN-IN-TELEVISION-AND-MOVIES furious. Jennette was hideously exploited, used, and abused by SO many adults in her work life, adults who were ultimately there to make money and who weren’t going to let something as silly as the mental and physical health of children get in their way. How disgusting are we that we KNOW this is a problem, it’s been a problem for a long time, and yet we continue to look the other way. If this book doesn’t make you think twice about Hollywood and children participating in it, I don’t know what will. As someone who grew up loving Nickelodeon, I’m utterly disgusted by how deeply soulless that network has turned out to be.

Jennette’s on the road to recovery. It’s not a smooth path, but, as she says, it’s important to not let the slips become slides, something I can deeply relate to. She’s a remarkable person, and I’m 100% cheering her on.

This is a deeply powerful memoir, one of the most powerful I’ve ever read. Emotional and physical devastation on every page, and yet Jennette’s writing will propel you through the pages at rocket speed. I’ve read that even people who weren’t aware of who Jennette McCurdy was before this book were as similarly affected as I was, so even if you’ve never watched a single episode of iCarly, this is one book you do NOT want to miss. I cannot state how strongly this book touched me, and how much I deeply wish that Jennette McCurdy is able to heal and cultivate the future she wants and needs.

Amazing, amazing book. If I could give it a hundred thousand stars, I would. 

Content warnings exist for physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, eating disorders, sexual exploitation, illness and death of a parent, and emotional trauma. 

Visit Jennette McCurdy’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

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nonfiction

Book Review: How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis

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I’m a homemaker, and I’m…kind of only a fair-to-middling one, to be honest. My house does NOT look like something out of Better Homes and Gardens; my meals are never perfectly plated; there are usually piles of books and toys and laundry waiting to be folded scattered in inconvenient places all over; my cobwebs have cobwebs. I’m no Martha Stewart. But I’m also always looking to improve my skills, even though I’m already kind of maxed out in terms of time and ability, so when I heard about How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing by KC Davis, LPC (S & S/Simon Element, 2020), I put it on my list immediately. Drowning? Absolutely.

This book truly is a gentle way to figure out what kind of housekeeping routine works for you, no matter what your hurdles. Depression? Chronic pain? ADHD? Sensory issues? This book covers how to get things done with all these and more, in a relaxed, friendly way that won’t leave you feeling ashamed, but rather, empowered, and confident. It’s not going to leave you with a magazine-shoot ready house (unless you follow their advice to call in outside help if it’s affordable). It will, however, make you realize that if you’re pulling rumpled clothes out of a laundry basket instead of hanging them all up, that’s okay. If you’re entirely tapped out and all you managed to do today is heat up a frozen pizza and serve it off paper plates because you can’t imagine having the energy to do dishes, that’s okay. It’s okay to set up systems that serve you during your hardest times, and this book is an excellent coach when it comes to getting you to stop the negative self-talk that keeps you from even trying to make a dent in your chores. (We all know that voice. It’s a really stupid voice.)

I’m happy to report that most of the things in this book are tactics I’ve learned to implement myself over the years, either through trial-and-error or with outside help. The parts about the inner voice really spoke to me, however, and I’ve been focused on watching how I speak to myself lately. I’ve also been taking the opportunity when I have the spoons for it to be kind to future me (emptying or loading the dishwasher at night, for example, so morning me has fewer things to do), as the book suggests. It helps.

If you struggle with getting it all done, or getting ANY of it done, you need How to Keep House While Drowning. It’s a tiny book, but it might just change everything for you.

Visit KC Davis’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: A Face for Picasso: Coming of Age with Crouzon Syndrome by Ariel Henley

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I think it was a BookRiot email that alerted me to the existence of A Face for Picasso: Coming of Age with Crouzon Syndrome by Ariel Henley (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021). The description of the memoir piqued my interest; I haven’t read all that much by or about people born with facial differences, so I was intrigued from the start, and, luckily, my library had a copy on the shelf.

Ariel and her sister Zan were born seemingly ‘normal,’ but within a few months, it became obvious that something was drastically wrong. Many doctor appointments later, the twins were diagnosed with Crouzon syndrome, a medical condition that’s usually genetic, but in the twins’ case, it’s merely a fluke of nature. This syndrome causes the skull to fuse together prematurely, leaving the brain with no room to grow. Surgery is needed to allow for space, and constant reshaping of the face is necessary. People affected have noticeable facial differences, including bulging and/or wide-spaced eyes and a protruding chin.

Ariel and her sister grew up knowing they were different. They were stared at constantly in public and treated terribly by their classmates and teachers. Their lives were marked by constant painful surgeries (over sixty of them), and middle school began a whole new level of hell for them. They became constant targets for their classmates; certain teachers actively made their lives more difficult; even their friends’ parents and coaches worked hard to make them miserable, simply because they looked different. And all this time, both girls were struggling with pain, constant medical appointments, and all the heavy emotions that come with being a young child and dealing with hardcore medical issues.

Ariel and Zan struggle. Ariel lashes out; she develops bulimia and PTSD from both the medical problems and the emotional difficulties. But along the way, she begins to learn who she is underneath it all, what she’s capable of, and she ultimately finds her voice.

Whew, this is a painful memoir. My heart broke again and again for Ariel and her sister, for the necessary medical torture they were put through, for the absolutely unnecessary mental and emotional torture the people around them put them through. I hope every last asshole who treated them poorly recognizes themselves in this story and feels well-deserved shame every day for the rest of their lives. Who acts like that???

I hadn’t read anything like this before, so I’m grateful to Ariel for being able to open up and share what living with Crouzon syndrome has been like. I had no idea what such intensive surgeries were like, and what the recovery period would be like. I’m so sorry that anyone has to go through that, especially children. I hope that hospitals and their social work departments will take note of this book and maybe develop better programs to help support families and patients going through these procedures, and living with these medically intense conditions.

Incredible memoir by an incredible young lady who has had to fight so much harder for any bit of normalcy that anyone should.

Visit Ariel Henley’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

graphic memoir · graphic nonfiction · nonfiction

Book Review: Numb to This: Memoir of a Mass Shooting by Kindra Neely

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I usually wait until I have a few graphic novels under my belt and then do a mass review, but this book deserves a review all its own.

I learned about Numb to This: Memoir of a Mass Shooting by Kindra Neely (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2022) from, I think, Twitter a few weeks ago, and it immediately went onto my TBR. My library was in the process of getting a copy, and I got the email that it was ready for me fairly quickly. I knew this would be an important book, and it’s exactly as powerful as I expected it would be.

Trigger warnings exist here for, obviously, mass shootings, and a suicide attempt.

In this stunning debut graphic novel, Kindra Neely describes her account of the 2015 Umpqua Community College Shooting. She was a student there at the time, just a regular, average young adult, when her life changed entirely. Eight students and a professor were killed, and the shooter committed suicide.

Kindra and her friends weren’t wounded – not bodily, anyway. That doesn’t mean they weren’t affected. Kindra finds herself struggling with the symptoms of PTSD, having difficulty being in public, affected by panic attacks, depression, and numbness. And what seems like almost the greatest insult is that instead of being allowed to heal, she’s forced to return to the incident again and again as nearly every day, news alerts appear on her phone, informing her of the newest mass shooting, of the latest creation of more victims, more deaths, more people grappling with how to move on from this kind of life-changing terror.

It’s an ongoing process, and Kindra makes many efforts to heal. It’s not easy, though: therapy isn’t always easy to come by in this country (cost and availability are a massive problem), and it’s really difficult to talk to even our closest friends about emotional struggles. And collectively, our country has decided that owning guns is more important than human lives, or the ability to live our lives without fearing death at every turn, so the fear of this happening again never really goes away, something Ms. Neely addresses when she brings up the fact that someone who survived one mass shooting was killed in another here in the US. Utterly horrifying.

But this book talks about it. This is an in-your-face, colorful, art-filled book that talks about the horror that our indifference to mass shootings has wrought. It shows in full color what the aftermath looks like years out. It demands to be heard, and I think this is going to be one of the most important books of the year. This book should be on every library shelf; it should be accessible to every student out there. It should be in the faces of every weak-willed member of Congress who laugh awkwardly at questions about why they continue to force us to live like this.

Kindra Neely is amazing and so brave to use her voice and her talent to bring her pain to the forefront. I’m beyond impressed, and grateful that she’s taking this stand, when she shouldn’t have to.

Read this book as soon as you can, and start demanding better for all of us. We all deserve it.

nonfiction

Book Review: Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker

Stephanie1 Comment

Little scares me more than schizophrenia. It attacks seemingly without warning; there are very few treatments; science isn’t even completely sure what causes it. I’ve seen the devastating toll it takes on families, thanks to my friend’s openness on her son’s struggle and ultimate death due to the side effects of the medication he took (a not-uncommon outcome; meds for schizophrenia are hard on the heart and various other organs). But I feel a need to keep reading about it, keep trying to understand, maybe in the hopes that one day I’ll read something positive, a sunnier outlook, an amazing breakthrough. When Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker (Doubleday Books, 2020) came out, it sounded like my worst nightmare, and it immediately went onto my list.

CONTENT WARNING: Sexual assault and child molestation.

Don and Mimi Galvin appeared, on the outside, to have an amazing family. An Air Force family, they had twelve children (ten boys, two girls), but perfection evaded the ever-growing family. As the boys grew older, one by one, they became stricken with serious mental illness. Schizophrenia took down one son after another, until six of them were affected, most of them so severely that they lived in hospitals, at home with Mimi, or in supportive housing arrangements. Where had it all gone wrong?

Combining scientific research, the history of mental health research and treatment and schizophrenia in particular, and the story of the Galvins and the tragedy that befell them, Robert Kolker has crafted a deep narrative that spans multiple decades of science, from ‘Schizophrenia is caused by overbearing mothers’ to ‘This is likely due to a complicated combination of genetics and possibly some outside factors.’ Due to the large size of the family, the Galvins became research subjects for multiple studies. The results won’t be available for decades, but this family just might be partly responsible for future breakthroughs on the disease.

My God, this was fascinating. CONTENT WARNING: there is a LOT of sexual abuse mentioned in this book. If you’re unable to handle reading about this subject right now, it’s okay to skip this one. Abuse ran rampant throughout this family; both the daughters and the sons were victimized by both family and people in the community. It’s difficult to read about, so if this isn’t something you can handle right now, it’s okay to take care of yourself and choose a book that will allow you to breathe a little easier.

Hidden Valley Road is about a family unexpectedly stricken with multiple cases of one of the most complex mental illnesses out there, who likely did the best they could at the time with what they had (which wasn’t always much; even today, schizophrenia and how to best treat it remains an enigma), and whom society has often failed. It’s social and scientific history, and despite its large size, it’s an absolute page-turner.

Visit Robert Kolker’s website here.

Follow him on Twitter here.

book review · fiction · YA

Book Review: The Survival List by Courtney Sheinmel

Stephanie1 Comment

Content warning: suicide

Sometimes a book has sat on my TBR long enough for me to forget what it’s about, but I usually just trust past me to have made the right choice in putting it on there and check it out from the library regardless. That happened with The Survival List by Courney Sheinmel (Katherine Tegen Books, 2019); it was at a different branch than my local one, so I hadn’t been able to get to it during the height of the pandemic. Restrictions have eased, and I’m back to being able to visit other libraries (we’ll see for how long. Looking at you, monkeypox…), so I was finally able to check this book out this past week, and hooboy, what a heartbreaking read.

Sloane’s older sister Talley has died by suicide, and Sloane and her father are left heartbroken, not understanding why, but unable to connect after such a devastating loss. When Sloane discovers a mysterious list in the pocket of the jeans Talley was wearing when she died, she’s confused, yet intrigued: what do all these things mean? She begins a quest to learn what these items and phrases meant to her sister, eventually leading her on a plane and out of state, in order to discover more about her beloved Talley.

Joining Sloane on this adventure is Adam, a boy whose number mysteriously ended up on the back of the list (but who claims to know nothing about Talley). Together, they go on a journey that leads to discovery of not only more about Sloane’s sister and the life she lived before she ended it too soon, but about Sloane as well.

Get out the box of tissues, friends. Once I realized what The Survival List was about, I was unsure if I could keep reading (even when I don’t remember what a book is about, I almost always just dive in without reading the inside flap. I like to live on the wild side…). Sloane’s pain in the beginning is raw and deeply felt; some of the passages in the first few chapters had me setting the book down for a few in order to take a few breaths while scrolling through social media (and with social media being the cesspool that it is these days, for that to be less emotionally taxing is saying something). I’m fortunate enough to have never lost anyone close to suicide, but I’ve supported friends who have lost friends, family members, and, devastatingly, children this way, and Ms. Sheinmel expertly nails the devastation and emotional fallout of the survivors.

While Sloane’s journey may be a little unattainable for most grieving teens (she’s able to travel to California due to the funds of a wealthy friend; her father thinks she’s out there attending a writing camp on an all-expenses-paid scholarship), the emotions here are strong and accurately portrayed, and the discoveries she makes about her sister are enlightening. Boy, do families need to up their communication games as a whole.

The Survival List is a gut-puncher of a novel wrapped in grief and devastation. It’s a heavy read, but it’s worth the emotional energy you’ll spend on it.

Visit Courtney Sheinmel’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

fiction

Book Review: This Close to Okay by Leesa Cross-Smith

Stephanie1 Comment

My goodness, it’s hard to get book reviews written these days. Homeschooling takes up ALL of my time from 8-3 and sometimes later (and during our breaks, I’m scrambling to get housework and cooking done, so there’s no review writing getting done there). What little reading I’m able to do gets squished in at night (and this month, I read a few books I don’t feel called to review (parenting book, book for my volunteer job, etc). I’m trying, I promise! It’s one of my goals this year to knock off all the ebooks on my list (since they’ve been sitting there for a while), and This Close to Okay by Leesa Cross-Smith (Grand Central Publishing, 2021) was the next one on that list to be available through my Libby app.

First off, this book centers on some heavy topics and comes with a few trigger warnings. This Close to Okay deals mainly with suicide, and the subject comes up often. There are also mentions of the death of a child later on, along with a scene (and brief mentions of the aftermath) of a burn accident. Make sure you’re able to handle these topics before picking up the book, and if now is not the time, take care of yourself and your mental health and go for a different book.

Driving home one night, therapist Tallie comes across a man standing on a bridge, poised to jump. Unable to walk away, she brings the man, who calls himself Emmett, back to her home, where she cares for him and the two begin to forge a connection. Emmett is a mystery; he won’t explain his past or what brought him to the bridge in the first place, but Tallie finds two notes in his jacket pocket that only compound the mystery of who Emmett is.

Emmett has run from his life and is making up for that by getting overly involved in Tallie’s (secretly emailing her ex-husband from a fake email account he sets up) and alternately considering returning to the bridge. Both he and Tallie are hiding things from each other despite their growing closeness, but Emmett’s secrets are beyond devastating. After a tragedy strikes at Tallie’s brother’s annual Halloween party and Emmett steps in to save the day, his secrets come out, and Emmett will be forced to reckon with what he wants his future to look like.

This didn’t really click with me. I think the first part of the premise – the therapist who stumbles upon a suicidal man on a bridge – was what brought me to the book in the first place, but what happens next – she takes him to her house?!?? – seems entirely unethical. I can’t imagine any practicing therapist worth their salt, who wouldn’t want to lose their license, wouldn’t go all-out trying to get the person some serious mental healthcare. I know, I know that mental health hospital beds are incredibly difficult to come by, if not downright impossible, but it seems to me that Tallie was at least obligated to try. Bringing a suicidal stranger into your home, as a single woman, seems unwise at best.

Emmett’s story, when it comes out, is terrible and tragic, but – spoiler alert – while he’s not Tallie’s client, the two of them hopping into bed together just days after he nearly killed himself seems unprofessional and unethical on Tallie’s part at best. It seriously felt icky to me. That said, I did like Tallie as a character, for the most part. She’s independent and thoughtful, focused on her future and building up her life after her divorce (which she’s still trying to heal from).

I didn’t dislike this one, but I had a difficult time getting past the initial, “Why aren’t you taking this suicidal man straight to the hospital?” That threw the whole rest of the book off for me.

Visit Leesa Cross-Smith’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

memoir · nonfiction

Book Review: A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy by Sue Klebold

Stephanie3 Comments

I was 18 when the massacre at Columbine happened, just under a year after having graduated from high school myself. I remember waking up that day and hearing the news and being shocked and horrified, and as the news continued to filter in over the next few weeks, I grieved not just for the victims and their families, but for the families of the perpetrators. What must their parents be feeling at that moment? Not only had they lost their children to suicide, those children had died in the most horrific (for the surviving parents) manner possible- purposefully taking others out with them. My heart ached badly for those parents, and over the years, I wondered how they were doing. A few years ago, I learned that Sue Klebold, mother of Dylan, had written a book, entitled A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (Crown, 2016). I immediately knew I wanted to read it (though I never formally added it to my TBR). On my last trip to the library, as I was grabbing a different book, her book was right in front of me on the shelf. I took it as a sign and put it into my bag.

Think back to when you were a teenager. How open were you with your parents? Did you inform them of the times you suffered from debilitating depression? Did you let them know about what was going on with your friend groups at all times? How many times did you spill the beans about what went on at those parties you went to? Did they really know the truth about all your friends? Teenagers hide a lot from their parents; it’s mostly developmentally normal, a way that they can begin to separate themselves from their parents and begin to form their full adult selves. And teens get really good at hiding things- I know I was- so much so that even the most attentive parents can miss major things. Such was the case for Sue Klebold and her husband Tom, who had begun to notice Dylan seeming a little distant just before the massacre, and who had plans to sit down and talk to him, but tragedy struck too soon.

In the aftermath of Columbine, Sue struggled greatly, unsure of how to process the fact that this child whom she had loved so very much, who had rarely given them any trouble and who seemed to be looking forward to a future at college, had murdered so many of his fellow classmates before turning the gun on himself. How had she not seen the signs? How could she ever possibly atone for the damage her son had caused the community? In her fog of grief, Sue began speaking with therapists, academics, brain health professionals, people who study violence and mass shootings, trying to find answers. Some, she found; others are questions that will remain unanswered forever.

This is a heavy memoir of the deep-seated grief of a mother who has lost her youngest son in one of the worst ways imaginable. It’s bad enough to lose a child; to lose a child who has killed others before killing himself, shattering everything you thought you knew not only about him but about your family and yourself as a parent, is a source of never-ending trauma. Sue Klebold has poured out her heart, soul, pain, grief, and desperate love for a son who committed heinous acts on these pages. You don’t stop loving your child when they do something terrible, but it takes a lot of mental readjustment to incorporate that into your understanding of that child. This book demonstrates the unthinkable difficulty of how to continue on after a nightmare comes to life, and it does so with grace and dignity.

My heart broke over and over for the Klebolds throughout this book: for their pain, for their loss, for the realization that they misinterpreted the signs that something was wrong, and for their gradual understanding that there’s not always a failproof way to prevent these things (look at how difficult it is to get any kind of mental health help; Ms Klebold mentions that Eric Harris, the other Columbine shooter, had been receiving help). It’s not always or maybe even often about how children are parented- how many families can you think of where one sibling has major problems like drugs or crime and the rest of the siblings live normal lives?

So much grief and guilt on every page of this book. I truly hope that Ms. Klebold has been able to find some modicum of peace. I know she’ll never stop loving and missing her son and questioning why- why him, why her, why their family, but I truly, truly hope she’s been able to find peace after such a terrible, terrible loss and painful aftermath.

fiction · YA

Book Review: Little & Lion by Brandy Colbert

Stephanie1 Comment

I was scrolling through an email from Jewish Women’s Archive about upcoming Book Talks and nearly fell out of my chair to see that Brandy Colbert would be making an appearance at an upcoming talk. I read her Pointe last year and enjoyed it, and it’s always so fantastic when an author you know and have previously enjoyed shows up anywhere you can get to, right???  She’ll be discussing her book, Little and Lion (Little, Brown, 2017), and, wanting to be as prepared as possible, I immediately put the book on my TBR and picked it up on my next library trip. Success! I’m ready! Bring on the book talk!

Suzette is a Black Jewish teen girl who has made her way back to her California home after spending a year at a New England boarding school, and all is not well on either coast. She’s running from a relationship with her female roommate that ended- or didn’t quite end- not exactly in the way that Suzette had wanted. She has a lot of complicated feelings about this. But things are complicated at home, too. The whole reason Suzette had been sent out east in the first place was because of trouble with her stepbrother, Lionel. Lionel had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder before she left, something that had turned everyone’s world upside down. Unsure of how to relate to her brother, who seems to want to push everyone away, and unsure of how to deal with her sexual identity- especially now that she’s home and hello, Emil, childhood friend who has suddenly become super hot, along with Rafaela, the plant shop girl who is on the periphery of Suzette’s friend group- Suzette has a lot on her plate.

Soon after she arrives back home, Lionel confides in Suzette a dangerous secret. Keeping it means maintaining Lionel’s trust, but it also means that things could go bad, quickly, for a lot of people. Love, sexuality, religion, trust, mental health, Ms. Colbert explores how all these intersect to form teenage identity, and how delicate the balancing act is for Suzette, who will have to make a series of difficult decisions in order to decide what kind of person she is, and who she wants to be.

This book felt incredibly real. There are so many things going on at once, so many major problems that so many teenagers face- sexual identity (and the need, or not, to label what we are), relationships (romantic, family, friendships), mental health, trust between friends and family, planning for the future, religious identity…There’s a lot going on in this book, but Ms. Colbert manages to weave everything together so seamlessly that one issue melts right into the next, just as it happens in real life. Suzette is put in several terrible positions, the most jarring by her stepbrother, and while the answer to her dilemma is crystal-clear as an adult, it’s incredibly easy to see why it would be so difficult to keep Lionel’s secret as a teenager. I was deeply able to emphasize with her struggle over this.

This is a novel of the search and struggle for identity, but it also asks a lot of questions. Why do we insist on putting our identities into so many separate boxes? We shouldn’t have to be this but not that, when by now we should all realize that we can be this AND that, simultaneously, and that the overlap is beautiful and brings so much to the table. And why do we insist on concrete identities, when we’re all really works in progress? Why can’t we be this at one stage, until we grow and mature and realize that we’ve blossomed into that– maybe with a little of this coloring the edges? Little & Lion explores all of this; Suzette’s journey encourages brave exploration but also deep contemplation and full acceptance of the all things that make us who we are.

There are so many places where this book could have gone off the rails or gone too far, and it just never did. It’s a gorgeous tapestry of the search for self, of what it takes to forge a connection with someone who is struggling and how far we should let that go, of who we are and the kind of person we want to be. I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that I thought often of Marra B. Gad’s The Color of Love: The Story of a Mixed-Race Jewish Girl multiple times, since her memoir dealt with identity and intersection of a similar-yet-different type (and was also an amazing book that is never far from my mind).

There are content warnings for descriptions of untreated mental illness and a forced outing of sexual orientation; if these are uncomfortable subjects for you at this time, be kind to yourself and wait until you’re ready.

I’m so excited for JWA’s Book Talk featuring Ms. Colbert, and I can’t wait to hear what she has to say about this book (and, well, about everything, honestly!). Suzette and Lionel had such a deep friendship, and I felt Suzette’s distress as Lionel pulled away from her, and her urgency to cling to what they once had. I’m so looking forward to hearing about her thought processes as she wrote this, and hearing what’s next for her. What a fabulous book.

Visit Brandy Colbert’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

nonfiction

Book Review: Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness by Alisa Roth

Stephanie1 Comment

Ever since reading Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation by Joseph T. Hallinan in my early 20’s, I’ve been fascinated by prison and have read about it often. And with prisons being the largest supplier of mental health care in the United States, I knew I needed to read Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness by Alisa Roth (Basic Books, 2018) when I learned about it- partly because of this fascination, and partly for semi-personal reasons.

In Insane, Ms. Roth details the challenges the prison system faces being the provider of mental healthcare for its millions of prisoners. Funding is short, so providers- whom it’s difficult to hire for various reasons, including safety and lower-than-civilian-jobs salaries- are constantly lacking. Therapy is challenging when it can only be given out in the open, with no privacy. Fewer providers mean services don’t get rendered in time; meds don’t get handed out in time; diagnoses don’t get made for months, sometimes years. Officers get little-to-no training in how to deal with severely mentally ill prisoners. Overcrowding exacerbates symptoms and strains already strained resources. If you’re unaware of just how overburdened the prison system is in regards to mental healthcare, you’ll have a pretty good idea after reading this book.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t places trying, and Ms. Roth points that out throughout the book. It’s just that this is a monumental task, and the country does almost next to nothing in order to keep these mentally ill patients treated so that they don’t end up in prison in the first place. (Our garbage healthcare system, tied to employment, shares a lot of this blame, as does the lack of therapists and psychiatrists- and I’d say the problem of affordable higher education is also an issue there.)

This is a deeply distressing, heavy book, full of information that I wish everyone knew and cared about. We’re all just one slightly different brain chemical away from ending up as a patient on the wrong side of the law- and that’s if we’re lucky, because far too often in the US, mentally ill people end up being shot by the police. A dear friend of mine had a son who suffered from schizophrenia and one of her greatest fears was always that he would end up being shot by the police during an episode. I learn so much about mental illness from her, and I think of her son and her continued fight to improve mental health care in this country every time I read a book like this. The two of them are a continued reason why I pick up these kinds of books; what Ms. Roth is doing, shining a light on the conditions faced by inmates who are often incarcerated due to the affects of their illnesses, is so necessary, and it’s such a service to the mental health community.

Insane isn’t an easy read. It’s a tough subject matter, and a lot of what she talks about will probably scare you or make you uncomfortable. It should. But you should use this information to become better informed and a better advocate for the mentally ill. Because stigma is bullshit and mental illness is illness- like cancer, or heart disease, diabetes, or epilepsy. It deserves research, resources, treatment options- treatment BEFORE tragedy, as my friend Laura says. And mentally ill people deserve dignity and respect, which Ms. Roth definitely affords them all throughout this remarkable book.

Visit Alisa Roth’s website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.