The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia
Brand: Vintage
Color: White
Categories: Books, Biographies & Memoirs, Community & Culture



Dimensions: 5.27 x 0.82 x 7.99 inches
ISBN-13: 978-0525434320
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0525434321
Publisher: Vintage
Print length: 304 pages
Publication date: April 28, 2020
subtitle: Paperback – April 28, 2020
author: Visit Amazon's Marin Sardy Page search results Marin Sardy
review: Editorial Reviews Review “Beautifully prismatic. . . . [A] blazing memoir.” —NPR “An astonishing, essential read.” — BuzzFeed “[A] beautiful and tragic memoir.” — The Wall Street Journal “Accomplished. . . . Offers a glimpse of the reality of living with schizophrenia and the multiplicities and contradictions that accompany the disease.” — The New York Times Book Review “A powerful examination of intergenerational mental illness, an incisive criticism of the treatment of mentally ill in society and in the healthcare system, and a poignant ode to love and family.” — Bustle “Heartbreaking. . . . With lyrical descriptions and a creative, nonlinear structure that mimics the erratic nature of schizophrenia—the book’s form shifts from prose to disembodied lists—Sardy traces the course that mental illness has cut through her family.” — Outside “A revelation. . . . Deeply moving. . . . A tribute to the associative workings of the human brain. . . . The legacy of Sardy’s writing is that you take that desperate hope and desire out into the world with you, beyond the page. This book changed how I thought about schizophrenia in a way first-person accounts couldn’t do.” —E.B. Bartels, Electric Literature “Essential. . . . Sardy traces the path of the schizophrenia that runs through three generations in her family.” — HelloGiggles “Crafts something moving, painful and touching out of the chaos.” — Paste , The Best Nonfiction Books of 2019 (So Far) “Poignant. . . . Harrowing. . . . Remarkable and powerful . . . Along with challenging stereotypes, Sardy conveys the ways mental illness can fracture lives and communities, all while emphasizing the humanity of those affected.” — Shondaland “Deeply affecting. . . . Any reader of this intelligent, deeply felt and beautifully written book will come away with a greater understanding of what it is to live with mental illness.” — Anchorage Daily News “[An] intimate, multigenerational memoir. . . . A deeply compassionate book about what it means to love someone who is mentally ill—about how hard it is to truly understand another person’s mind and the importance of continuing to try. . . . [A] tender, heart-rending book.” — Undark Magazine “Narratively compelling and exquisitely written but, perhaps more importantly, infused with love and empathy. . . . A textured and nuanced tapestry that is both deeply personal [and] universally moving.” — Santa Fe Reporter “Succeeds brilliantly. . . . Should be required reading for mental health professionals.” — Library Journal (starred review) “An extraordinarily ambitious and accomplished narrative. . . . Illuminat[es] mental illness from the inside out. . . . Both powerful and disturbing. . . . [An] impressive debut.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred) About the Author Marin Sardy’s essays and criticism have appeared in Tin House , Guernica , The Rumpus , Fourth Genre , The Missouri Review , ARTnews , and Art Ltd ., as well as in two award-winning photography books, Landscape Dreams and Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby . She has also been the arts editor-in-chief at Santa Fe’s Santa Fean magazine. A Pushcart Prize nominee, Sardy has twice had her work listed among the year’s notable essays in Best American Essays . She lives in Tucson, Arizona. www.marinsardy.com Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From Ultima Thule: ### After Tom died, I read parts of his journals from the years leading up to the onset of his illness. I couldn’t get through them—his near-frantic distress about the way his life was going, how long he had struggled before full-blown psychosis set in. I could feel from the page his aching depression, a stinging kind of loneliness. Nothing he tried seemed to work out, except working out, which he did obsessively. He wanted to study but was failing at school. He wanted to attract girls but couldn’t connect with them. And he didn’t know why. He felt deeply that something was wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. No wonder, then, that when psychosis came in with all its colors it felt like salvation. There had been a lover, back some time before. We didn’t know until long after, when Dad took a wilderness first aid course and she, the instructor, approached him. She had seen the last name on the roster and asked if he was related to Tom. They talked a little while. She said, “He broke my heart.” I later found among Tom’s journals a note from her with a beautiful drawing of some mountains. Her language was precise, lovely. Why he broke it off, why he never mentioned her— Among other things, one’s perception of time is heavily altered in psychosis. Time loses its continuity, becomes episodic, fragmented, gaping. Much is forgotten, or remembered only as a mood, an atmosphere. Sass noted that people with schizophrenia often speak of “the immobility of time, of the loss of past and future,” of difficulty recalling events in the correct order. Events are not processed, integrated, linked to one another in succession, but rather become, as other researchers noted, like “a series of stills.” One man with psychosis described it as “the infinite present.” Recently my mother asked me where I went to college. If I had ever lived in Europe. She sounded apologetic, a little embarrassed. I once met an oral historian who spoke of a “narrative crisis” occurring in people with mental illness, the result of drastic disruptions in the trajectories of their lives and in their recollections of events—a sense of loss of agency, loss of control over not only their lives but also their life stories. Loss of the capacity to shape a life into a story. By the time Tom was homeless, I had left Alaska for good, chasing down a vague but persistent notion of myself as a writer, following it from Bozeman to graduate school in New Hampshire, then to Santa Fe, where I found work at a magazine (and Will), before moving on to New York and finally Tucson. I only rarely got back to Anchorage, and never for long. In Tom’s eight years on the street, I would see him only four times on two visits home—twice for an hour or so and twice for just a few minutes. One of those times, I spotted him while riding in a friend’s car down on our neighborhood’s end of Northern Lights Boulevard, the main artery through our part of town, in the residential section that was lined with landscaping of grass and birch trees. We pulled over and I jumped out, but my friend’s presence disconcerted him and after only a few exchanges he said he had to go. Experience can be defined, as anthropologist Robert Desjarlais has suggested, as a reflective process of interpretation and assimilation of our encounters through time. If this is so, does psychosis create a vacuum of experience? What did Tom make of our encounters? Did he absorb them, consider them, remember them? Riding away, I fretted in silence, wondering where he was walking to. Maybe he would head all the way out past Mom’s old duplex to where a high barbed-wire-topped fence divided the houses from the boggy woods surrounding the airport. Maybe he would cut over into Earthquake Park and go out toward the seaside bluffs on the Coastal Trail, as we all had long ago, on bikes or Rollerblades or running shoes. Maybe he would follow the shore and its wide, wild mudflats out to the overlook at Point Woronzof, where Cook Inlet rolled into Knik Arm and on a clear day you could see all the way to Denali. Where does experience go if it can’t proceed forward? For the homeless mentally ill, Desjarlais proposed, it tends to dissolve into an ongoing succession of shocks and surprises—distractions interspersed among months or years of an unmoored kind of stasis. I have a memory that keeps surfacing. In high school, on overcast nights in winter, the clouds and the snow would trap in the orange light of the streetlamps, making the sky glow a dense pinkish orange-brown. Evenings, desperate to get out of Dad’s house, I would sometimes take the Wagoneer and drive west on Northern Lights near where I would see Tom walking so many years later—out beyond the airport, past the runways, to where the city lights ended and the clouds faded to a deep blue-black, turned invisible. I would look up as I drove, watching for the moment I got out from under that toxic sky. Then I would park at a pullout and turn off the car lights and just sit alone in the darkness, listening to the radio. Was he beset? Was he thrown wide? Was psychosis a land of many promises? Did he know he was a prisoner there? Read more