Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness
When he was 10 years old, the author watched as his brother Michael lost  his mind. High on LSD and screaming uncontrollably because God was torturing  him, the 14-year-old smashed everything in his bedroom, his feet red with blood  from broken glass. Michael collected snakes and let them slither around his  naked body; he beat Greg nearly senseless, then smashed his own forehead into a  sharp branch in repentance; he stayed up all night, watching Christian  television or "puzzling over his strange and cruel distance from God." Their  parents, preoccupied by the ceaseless work that had taken them from a dirt-poor  Virginia town to an affluent suburb that they really couldn't afford, thought  drugs the problem and throwing Michael out the answer. Not until 1977, when he  was 21, did they learn that he was an acute paranoid schizophrenic, so severely  mentally ill that he probably would never be healed, although medication might  control his behavior. Michael became increasingly dangerous, but could not be  institutionalized against his will; when he set their house on fire in 1993, the  father's reaction was relief: "This was the best thing that could have  happened.... He'll be put away." He was, and, Bottoms acknowledges, "We've all  found a peace without Michael that we're not willing to give up." There's no  false sentiment in this unflinching memoir of a family that's alienated, instead  of united, by tragedy: "We all hid from each other," Bottoms writes with  characteristic candor. "We shared a space, a roof, nothing else." There is,  however, tremendous sorrow for a blighted life and the havoc that it wrought.  Bottoms's finely crafted prose offers no consolation or easy answers--simply  emotional precision and the satisfaction of hard truth.--Wendy Smith--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.