Homer & Langley tells the fictional story of two real brothers who died in a Fifth Avenue mansion filled with treasures and detritus after a lifetime of collecting, much of which spent cut off from the world, having dismissed the staff and rarely venturing out. One brother is blind and the other is nominally the [...]
Posts Tagged as ‘mental patients’
August 11, 2009
The Soloist by Steve Lopez
The Soloist is the unlikely story of a homeless violinist who is befriended by a Los Angeles Times columnist (the author of the boook) and turns out to be an ex-Juilliard student who became schizophrenic while still in school and never recovered. The columnist writes about him in the paper, befriends him, gets him new [...]
May 13, 2009
Lowboy by John Wray
Lowboy is a depressing novel about a young paranoid schizophrenic who stops taking his medication and escapes from the hospital into the vast city of New York, to wreak who knows what havoc. The police detective tasked with finding him finds his mother strangely protective and uncooperative at the same time as they interview the [...]
February 9, 2009
The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick
If, like me, you don’t care for football or don’t know much about it, don’t let the helmet on the cover of The Silver Linings Playbook deter you: this is a really good book! It’s the story of a recovering mental patient who slowly comes to grip with the fact that his ex-wife is gone for good while [...]
September 12, 2008
Manic: a memoir by Terri Cheney
Manic is a terrifying and wonderful book. Written by an episodically successful lawyer (when she’s neither depressed or fully manic), it lays out the brutal reality of what it’s like to be bipolar in a world arranged for “normal” people. Despite the suicide attempts, the outrageous behavior, the prison, the mental hospitals, the author manages [...]
