"Brilliant, heartbreaking, tender, and highly original - poet Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a sweeping and shattering portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born--a history whose epicenter is rooted in...

"Vince Granata remembers standing in front of his suburban home in Connecticut the day his mother and father returned from the hospital with his three new siblings in tow. He had just finished scrawling their names in orange chalk on the driveway: Christopher, Timothy, and Elizabeth. Twenty-three years later, Vince was a thousand miles away when he received shocking news that would change his life-his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia,...

"Dan Mathews knew that his eccentric mother, Perry Lawrence, was outspoken, foul-mouthed, and, at seventy-nine years old, unable to maintain her fiercely independent lifestyle-so he flew her across the country (with a gay man as her escort) to live with him in a dilapidated Victorian townhouse in Portsmouth, Virginia. What he didn't know was that she was schizophrenic. Over the next five years, Dan and Perry built a rollicking life together fueled...

A neuroscientist explores the biological bases of schizophrenia and tells the heartbreaking story of his own brother's battle with the disease. When bright lives are, derailed by schizophrenia, bewildered and anxious families struggle to help, and to cope, even as scientists search for causes and treatments that prove elusive. Painful and often misunderstood, schizophrenia profoundly affects people who have the disease and their loved ones. Here...

"He Came In With It is the chronology of a mother and her family's coping with mental illness: the hurdles of diagnosis and treatment -- of stigma, denial, shame-- of pretending that things are T-square perfect for all the lacquered world"--

After a decade of caring for crazy and keeping her mother's mental illness a secret from the outside world, twenty-year-old Paolina Milana longs for just one year free from the madness of her home. When she gets the chance to go to an out-of-state school, she takes it, but her family won't leave her be. Letter after letter arrives, constantly reminding her of the insanity rooted in her family tree. Even worse, the voices in her own head whisper words...

This memoir is Virginia Holman's stunning debut and winner of the Pushcart Prize in 2001. Virginia delves into the often painful, occasionally joyful, moments of her childhood with a schizophrenic mother. Through touching honesty and self-reflection, Virginia confronts memories of a life in which reality and fantasy gradually became difficult to separate.

"Award-winning novelist and poet Gayle Brandeis's wrenching memoir of her complicated family history and her mother's suicide Gayle Brandeis's mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant...

Dawn Elgin was destined to be a 1940s big-band star. From the time she was fourteen, she took her place at the microphone in Houston's elite Empire Room and sang with the voice of a jazz angel. Vibrant and glamorous, she boldly pursued her love of performing to New Orleans, Hollywood, and New York, where she gave birth to her daughter, Tara, when she was twenty-one. Then Dawn began to suffer persistent visions of a deathly specter at her bedside....