A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia by Claire P

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A daughter breaks the family silence about her mother's schizophrenia, reframing hospitalizations, paranoia, illness, and caregiving through a feminist lens.

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

'Unsurprisingly, feminists have been at the forefront of writing illness narratives, from Virginia Woolf to Audre Lord and Susan Sontag. My family's inability to accommodate my mother's illness, the perniciousness of her particular subtype of schizophrenia, paranoia, and the story of women's fight for gender equality in both the workplace and at home are part of this chronicle.' A Room with a Darker View is an unflinching, feminist work that chronicles the author's troubled relationship with her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer, whose severe illness - marked by manic bouts of senseless laughter, persistent delusions, and florid hallucinations - went unrecognized for decades by both her husband, a world-class British astrophysicist, and her father, a Jewish-Zimbabwean doctor knighted by Pope Paul VI. Told in fragments, flashbacks, and chronicling the most extreme but unfortunately common aspects of schizophrenia, this elegantly written memoir is a reflection on illness, shame, and the generation gaps that have defined mother-daughter relationships amid the evolution of feminism in the 20th century. Like Porochista Khakpour's lauded memoir, Sick (2018), A Room with a Darker View is not a linear tale of redemption or restitution. Rather, it challenges conceptions about mental illness and how we frame contributions by outliers to society, while offering a scathing look at a broken medical system, the unwillingness of an elite educated family to reckon with its secrets, and finally, the universally understood difficulty of caring for an aging parent with a chronic illness. 

Author Biography

Claire Phillips is the author of the memoir A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia (DoppelHouse) and the novella Black Market Babies (11th Hour Press). She is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets prize and a Pushcart Prize notable. Her writing has appeared in Black Clock magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy, Joyland, Los Angeles Review of Books, Motherboard-Vice, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among other places. She teaches writing at CalArts, SCI-Arc, and U.C. Irvine, and is Director of the Los Angeles Writers Reading Series at Glendale College. She holds a M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University and a B.A. in English from San Francisco State University.

Review

As heroic as it is original, Claire Phillips' writing always finds the scary corners that would be secret to any other author, from which inevitably there comes into vision a revelatory perspective. Reading A Room With a Darker View, you won't shake it from your mind; finishing it, you won't shake it from your memory.—Steve Erickson, author of Shadowbahn and ZerovilleShort, distilled chapters of quietly tantalizing prose grip us throughout the span of Claire Phillips' fully realized and haunting story of her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer with a mental illness difficult to treat and to diagnose. —Bruce Baumann, author of And the Word Was and Broken SleepAn engrossing story of identity formation, Phillips ultimately gives us not a confessional memoir but a parable of agency and resilience amid uncertain reality. As a speculative fiction writer whose work is rooted in an encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction, she crafts a tale of time travel, one where past-present-futures collapse into braided familial, personal, and social histories. Throughout the book Phillips illuminates the fierce reality of her mother's delusions as well as the tools she gives her daughter to survive her. —Connie SamarasAn inventively told and wholly original memoir.—David Gutowski, Largehearted BoyA moving portrait of her mother and their relationship, A Room with a Darker View is a book that people who are going through something similar need to read. Mental illness is a story, like everyone's life is a story.... Many people don't want to talk about death or illness, they want to talk about the heroics. But I think some of the heroics are just telling these stories. In this book, Phillips' mother has a full life.– Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of a Turning World'A Room with a Darker View' openly confronts the subject of mental illness in such a way that the book stands out brightly alongside novels such as Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar' and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'. [...] The book is incredibly informative and to the point regarding its subject matter but still remains a beautiful and tragic examination of a woman gradually losing her mother. Claire Phillips generously invites her readers into her world and shares her experience without any hesitation.—Amelia Kennedy, Write or Die TribeThrough research into her mother's schizophrenia, and vignettes depicting the hoops of the American health-care system their family had to jump through in order to treat it, Phillips illustrates that, as a society, we still have a long way to go in order to better understand and help those with mental illnesses, and to assist their families in getting their loved ones the critical care they need.—Los Angeles Review of Books

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Prizes

Nominated for Pushcart Prize 2015

Long Description

'Unsurprisingly, feminists have been at the forefront of writing illness narratives, from Virginia Woolf to Audre Lord and Susan Sontag. My family's inability to accommodate my mother's illness, the perniciousness of her particular subtype of schizophrenia, paranoia, and the story of women's fight for gender equality in both the workplace and at home are part of this chronicle.' A Room with a Darker View is an unflinching, feminist work that chronicles the author's troubled relationship with her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer, whose severe illness - marked by manic bouts of senseless laughter, persistent delusions, and florid hallucinations - went unrecognized for decades by both her husband, a world-class British astrophysicist, and her father, a Jewish-Zimbabwean doctor knighted by Pope Paul VI. Told in fragments, flashbacks, and chronicling the most extreme but unfortunately common aspects of schizophrenia, this elegantly written memoir is a reflection on illness, shame, and the generation gaps that have defined mother-daughter relationships amid the evolution of feminism in the 20th century. Like Porochista Khakpour's lauded memoir, Sick (2018), A Room with a Darker View is not a linear tale of redemption or restitution. Rather, it challenges conceptions about mental illness and how we frame contributions by outliers to society, while offering a scathing look at a broken medical system, the unwillingness of an elite educated family to reckon with its secrets, and finally, the universally understood difficulty of caring for an aging parent with a chronic illness.

Review Quote

Through research into her mother's schizophrenia, and vignettes depicting the hoops of the American health-care system their family had to jump through in order to treat it, Phillips illustrates that, as a society, we still have a long way to go in order to better understand and help those with mental illnesses, and to assist their families in getting their loved ones the critical care they need. --Los Angeles Review of Books

Excerpt from Book

Organic disease Despite my mother''s long-standing diagnosis, it had been all too easy for me to slip back into "the metaphorical," as Susan Sontag has been oft quoted on the topic, and view my mother''s illness as a psychological, self-perpetuating phenomenon: she was ill equipped to survive the stressors of "late capitalism" and the gender inequities in the work place and in those places that undergirded her domestic life; she was from an entitled family and therefore destroyed by her inability to "rate" as highly as the other top performers, the men who seemed to secure for themselves leadershiproles, awards, and unassailable income. It always seemed possible somehow to fault my mother for her condition despite the hallucinations, the multiple relapses, the catatonia, the difficulty she had in making friends, or driving with confidence even though she remained squarelybetween the lines. Researching the brain science, for a short while, I was able to put this view to rest. "Mental illness is not in the mind, but rather in the brain," biologist Dr. Ronald Chase tells us in his scientific memoir Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science --a compassionate and determined work in which Chase weaves alternating chapters between the history and latest biomedical science undergirding the study of schizophrenia with the story of his brother''s illness. While initially schizophrenia was believed by Emil Kraepelin in the nineteenth century to be a disease of the brain, writes Chase, its neuropathology was so obscure that according to Paul J. Harrison of Brain magazine, it was soon identified to be "a ''functional'' psychosis, a disorder with no structural basis." It is only somewhat recently with CT scans and MRIs, Chase writes, that the neuropathologic basis of schizophrenia is once again of serious import. Additionally, he tells us past autopsies reveal a number of confirmed abnormalities in the brains of those who suffer from schizophrenia--for example, "ventricular enlargement and decreased cerebral (cortical and hippocampal) volume." There are other noted structural differences. Of the brain disorder from which his brother suffered, Chase writes, "The brains of people with schizophrenia show a significantly greater reduction of gray matter (the area that includes regions such as muscle control, sensory perception, memory, emotions, speech, decision making, and more) than do the brains of healthy individuals. Moreover, much of the white matter (tissue through which the communication between the different areas of gray matter in the nervous system happens) has an abnormal physical appearance in brains of people who have schizophrenia." Chase believes strongly thatschizophrenia should be classified as a brain disorder and not a behavioral disorder. Like Parkinson''s disease or Alzheimer''s, schizophrenia should be treated as a medical illness. The myths of schizophrenia Parsing recent neuroscience findings, Esm

Description for Sales People

The author chronicles her mother''s mental illness and its devastating effects on the family but at the same time her mother''s incredible coping skills regarding her schizophrenia as well as the successes her mother had in her life. A Room with a Darker View is told from the perspective of an outsider/insider who can both see her mother''s brilliance in law as a mind, but also the domestic havoc of that mind and who has her own story to tell as the witness. A Pushcart Prize nomination and notable mention in Best American Essays 2015 resulted from a long-format personal essay featuring parts of this book manuscript published in Black Clock ("Hanging from the Chandeliers"). A Room with a Darker View is written in a literary manner using episodic flashes through time. In this way, the fractured narrative provides a truth about what we as readers know cannot be the whole story of schizophrenia. This elegant self-conscious construction is appropriately different than a linear narrative. Poetic language propels the book. There''s an opening in culture right now to discuss and share the great shame of schizophrenia in families, which has been and is usually a closely guarded and painful secret. ( The Collected Schizophrenias by Esm

Details ISBN1733957901 Author Claire Phillips Publisher DoppelHouse Press Year 2020 ISBN-10 1733957901 ISBN-13 9781733957908 Format Paperback Imprint DoppelHouse Press Subtitle Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia Place of Publication Los Angeles Country of Publication United States Short Title A Room with a Darker View Language English Pages 272 Illustrations Photograph of the author and her mother Publication Date 2020-10-01 NZ Release Date 2020-10-01 US Release Date 2020-10-01 UK Release Date 2020-10-01 DEWEY 616.8980092 Audience General AU Release Date 2020-10-26 We've got this

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