Dazzlingly, daringly written, marrying the thoughtful originality of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts with the revelatory power of Neurotribes and The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, this propulsive, stunning book illuminates the experience of living with schizophrenia like never before. Sandra Allen did not know her uncle Bob very well. As a child, she had been told he was “crazy,” that he … been told he was “crazy,” that he had spent time in mental hospitals while growing up in Berkeley in the 60s and 70s. But Bob had lived a hermetic life in a remote part of California for longer than she had been alive, and what little she knew of him came from rare family reunions or odd, infrequent phone calls. Then in 2009 Bob mailed her his autobiography. Typewritten in all caps, a stream of error-riddled sentences over sixty, single-spaced pages, the often incomprehensible manuscript proclaimed to be a “true story” about being “labeled a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic,” and arrived with a plea to help him get his story out to the world.
In A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise, Allen translates her uncle’s autobiography, artfully creating a gripping coming-of-age story while sticking faithfully to the facts as he shared them. Lacing Bob’s narrative with chapters providing greater contextualization, Allen also shares background information about her family, the culturally explosive time and place of her uncle’s formative years, and the vitally important questions surrounding schizophrenia and mental healthcare in America more broadly. The result is a heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious portrait of a young man striving for stability in his life as well as his mind, and an utterly unique lens into an experience that, to most people, remains unimaginable.more
A KIND OF MIRRACULAS PARADISE is a unique work of nonfiction about mental illness.
When Sandra Allen was studying for her MFA in writing, her Uncle Bob, a hermit she barely knew, mailed her the story of his life as a paranoid schizophrenic. The single-spaced manuscript was typed in all caps with run-on sentences and typos, and contained a plea to help get his story out into the world.
She tried to ignore the manuscript, but something sucked her into the world of the family member she’d grown up believing to be crazy—the person who was missing from the wall of family photographs. What she discovered was an intense, heartbreaking, and at times hilarious story of mental hospital stays, busking and life in a band, failed jobs, and a religious awakening. There were stories of hallucinations, missing days, and paranoia, but also stories of friends and neighbors who made a difference.
Bob was first institutionalized at fourteen. His dad and stepmom told him they were going on a trip. He translated that to mean a family vacation, not a locked psyche ward where he was injected with massive amounts of heavy-duty drugs without explanation.
Many of the chapters are in Bob’s voice, complete with typos, although Sandra has changed the narrative from first person to (mainly) third. Interspersed are chapters of her journey with the manuscript, and how she fact-checked incidents with living family members and resurrected early memories of her own. She concludes that many of the stories she didn’t at first believe were, indeed, true, and by the end, decides he typed in all caps due to his failing eyesight.
Ultimately, the book provides a window into the treatment of schizophrenia in the 60s and 70s and highlights the still-present stigma. When Sandra reveals her concerns about how the family will react to the book, I understand. My aunt was also diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and I grew up under that code of family silence.
Bob died without knowing that his story had become public, but I’m glad his voice can finally be heard.
Thought this was a great book that showed the confusing and crazy times in the life of Bob, a relative of the author. A revised autobiography, told as a revised biography of Bob by his relative – every other chapter being a dive into verifying events by Sandy, research, hearing from others about how true Bob’s memory was, etc. – of a man’s struggles as both a teen and adult with the mental health system.
Reality is a weird, funky thing. Many of the stories he tells seem unreal, but turn out to have definitely happened. I think it was great that Sandy did so much investigation into understanding how “schizophrenia” is perceived, it’s history, psychiatric survivors, families, patients, victims, critics, and more. A well-detailed look at things, that I think people could really benefit from reading.
An interesting aside is that, at one point, Bob has the following experience:
—–
In the sky, he could make out some stars.
He looked down at his dog, who sat patiently by.
He looked again at the sky. Something had caught his eye.
An airplane?
He looked and – there! – he saw it again.
He couldn’t tell what it was, but it was moving.
He kept staring, trying to decide whether his eyes were playing tricks on him, but the more he focused on it, the more he was certain there was something there, something blocking out just the stars at first, and then a stand of clouds, SOME DARK SHADOW OF SOME CRAFT:
It was coming closer.
Couldn’t be an airplane.
Bob squinted and as he did a ray of energy hit him in the head, throwing him onto the dust.
He blacked out.
—–
This reminds me of Phillip K. Dick, as he wrote a fictionalized hash-up of his own personal experiences (the VALIS trilogy) relating to a pink beam he believed had been shot at his head from space (in real life, in 1974). He wrote a collection of notes and theories that ended up posthumously compiled into a book called The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick that catalogs his experience. Strange stuff. He was also regarded by people to have had schizophrenia. Just an unrelated side note!
I would definitely recommend this book to those unfamiliar with what the impact of a schizophrenia diagnosis can have on the life of an individual in Western society. A well-balanced look at the struggles of the mind, and also the struggles of those wrapped up in the system. Especially involuntary treatment. The chapter “You Can Call It Anything” (pg. 93 – 101) is a great section on its own, taking a look into what something like “psychotic paranoid schizophrenia” even means.