Guest Blog by Florence Reiss Kraut
Back in October, when I launched my debut novel, How to Make a Life, I did not have any idea that one of the ways I would be sharing my book with libraries and on-line book clubs would be as an example of how a family copes with the mental illness of one of its members.
I thought How to Make a Life, which traces an immigrant family over one hundred years through all kinds of adventure and troubles, had an intrinsic interest for different ethnicities and all ages. It had drama, war, love stories, tragedy, betrayal. I thought those issues would be what attracted readers to my book. But as I did my early presentations to book clubs and libraries what continually came through was the connection readers felt to the character of Ruby, the sister, mother, wife, daughter who suffers from a lifelong chronic mental illness that affects everyone in the family. It became clear to me that people were resonating to her.
While watching a virtual book event at a local library, I heard Marlena Maduro Baraf talk about her beautiful and poetic memoir, At the Narrow Waist of the World, which describes growing up in Panama as the child of a mother who suffers from mental illness. The immediate interest of the audience in the subject made me think about the books I had read through the years where the main character suffers from chronic mental illness. There are many of them.
Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar came to mind. It so movingly describes the mental breakdown and recovery of a young woman struggling to find herself in a world where men are in charge and societal norms make it almost impossible for a woman to fulfill her desires and potential.
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest describes the inhumane treatment of people hospitalized with mental illness in the 1950s and 1960s and the importance of recognizing all people’s individuality and dignity. In the book Nurse Ratched, the overseer of the ward in which the main character “Mac” McMurphy is placed, oppresses and dehumanizes her patients, much the way the world treated them at the time.
I recently read John Green’s Turtles All the Way Down, a young adult novel, but one which is a must read for adults as well. In it, Green brilliantly describes the struggles and pain of a teenage girl, Aza Holmes, who suffers from an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Throughout the book we are in Aza’s mind, experiencing her pain and terror. John Green, who has bravely and publicly told of his own lifelong obsessive-compulsive illness, shows us Aza’s struggles, in all their complexity, with compassion and understanding. In the end we admire Aza’s strength in dealing with her illness.
As I thought about it, in most of the novels and memoirs that I read which deal prominently with mental illness, it is the main character who suffers with the condition. The effects of the protagonist’s behavior on family members seem peripheral. But in Marlena Baraf’s memoir we experience her mother’s mental illness through the eyes of the author as a child, who tries to understand and help.
In my novel we see Ruby from the point of view of her mother Bessie, who devotes her life to trying to fix her daughter, and Jenny who is appointed caretaker of her sister, and Ruby’s daughter and son who try to escape their mother’s illness by running away. In thinking about our two books, I realized that they both resonated with audiences, because so many of our attendees were in families grappling with members who had mental illness or other chronic disorders.
Marlena and I decided to craft a joint program for libraries and book events that dealt with the effects on families of their member’s mental illness and what they did about it. We drew on Marlena’s personal experience with her mother, and my 30 years as a clinical social worker.
We found libraries welcomed the idea of a book program about the effects of mental illness on families, especially during May, which is Mental Health Awareness month. While most of the programs will have a librarian interacting with us, one library, in Chicago, has a psychologist who will be interviewing us, further enriching the program.
I am excited by these programs because they extend the ways in which we can talk about our books to audiences and share their relevance with people all over the country. It proves once again that we should never underestimate how books truly reflect aspects of readers’ lives and help them to understand themselves.
Florence Reiss Kraut is a native New Yorker, raised and educated in four of the five boroughs of New York City. She holds a BA in English and a master’s in social work. She worked for thirty years as a clinician, a family therapist, and the CEO of a family service agency before retiring to write and travel widely. She has published personal essays for The New York Times and her fiction has appeared in journals including The Evening Street Press, SNReview, The Westchester Review and others. She lives with her husband in Rye, New York. Visit her at www.florencereisskraut.com.
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