Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother
Fiction writer McCloskey tackles the prickly subject of schizophrenia in this bracing memoir about her older brother, Mike. In heartbreaking detail, she recounts Mike’s descent from smart, handsome intercollegiate athlete to muttering, wool-capped, house-bound stranger. (As the disease progressed, Mike would also drop out of sight for long periods of time.) McCloskey attempts to understand her brother’s downward mental spiral, talking with those who knew him in his early life and reviewing letters he wrote to her at various stages of his illness. But she remains puzzled by his peculiar behavior and panicky that she herself might be losing her mind. I had the disconcerting sense that it was not me who was having my thoughts, she writes, but my thoughts that were having me. (For a time, while living in Ireland, she found herself drinking heavily, spending her days alternating between two local dives.) Throughout, McCloskey praises her mother as the constant in Mike’s life, a kindhearted woman driven, perhaps, by the vain hope that the son she once knew would someday return. --Allison Block