"Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom. There was a script for a family like the Galvins--hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they all tried to play their parts. But behind the closed doors of the house on Hidden Valley Road was a far different reality: psychological breakdown,...

The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road returns with the second volume of The Passenger series: Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. 1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University...

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.

"When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor seemed destined to become inseparable. The boys, both children of college professors, grew up on the same street in intellectually vibrant homes shaped by ideas, liberal Jewish culture, the trauma of the Holocaust, and a shared love of basketball and standup comedy. But the two best friends were also keen competitors bearing the same great expectations, and when Michael...

While on vacation with their parents, Matthew Homes and his older brother snuck out in the middle of the night. Only Matthew came home safely. Ten years later, Matthew tells us, he has found a way to bring his brother back... What begins as the story of a lost boy turns into a story of a brave man yearning to understand what happened that night, in the years since, and to his very person. Unafraid to look at the shadows of our hearts, Nathan Filer's...

Bob, a feckless bachelor, promised his mother that at her death he would care for his schizophrenic younger brother D.J. but he becomes apprehensive when the time comes. Facing up to his responsibility, Bob tries his best, but his set ways and D.J.'s erratic behavior mix like oil and water. Giving his promise one last shot, Bob takes D.J. on a fishing trip to the secluded lake where they vacationed as children. Here, the rush of memories transforms...

"My friend and former Hunter classmate, Sarah Eggers, wrote a poem years ago referencing an anecdote about Frida Kahlo that has never left me: Clare Boothe Luce, editor of Vanity Fair, commissioned Frida to paint a commemorative portrait of her close friend, Dorothy Hale, a Ziegfeld girl and struggling actress who had committed suicide. Frida took it upon herself to execute an "ex-voto" style painting, detailing Dorothy's jump from the sixteenth floor...

"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...

Professor of psychiatry Elyn R. Saks writes about her struggle with schizophrenia in this unflinching account of her mental illness. In The Center Cannot Hold, Saks draws readers into a nightmare world of medications, a misguided health care system, and social stigmas. But she would not be defeated. With a strength and force of will that most can only imagine, Saks reclaimed her life and went on to achieve great success.

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...