Just Like Someone With A Mental Illness Only More So, Mark Vonnegut

I can’t quite imagine being the child of someone famous, having to live in the shadow of huge achievement – in any field – always dwarfed by the mania created by greatness, and somehow still trying to seek approval from this parent who is so clearly sublime. It is even harder to imagine doing all of this under the cloud of any sort of mental illness or instability – how to deal with one’s own personal shame and then the broader communal shame that would surely be aroused by media gossip and the interest of those hunters of the famous.

This is what Mark Vonnegut faced. He has dealt with it before in a memoir which I have never read and I have to confess, that while I have heard much about Vonnegut senior and his contribution to literature, I have never actually read his work. What intrigued me most about Mark Vonnegut’s latest account of his life, challenges and achievements, was the great heights to which he himself soared and the manner in which he almost seems to dismiss these magnificent achievements.

Here is a man who despite having been institutionalised for a psychotic break at a young age and then being forced to exist on medication to cope with his bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, still manages to write a book, graduate from Harvard Medical School, become a successful paediatric specialist, recover from addiction to alcoholism and still be stoic enough to revisit his past in a second memoir. And, I haven’t mentioned that he bought a house, got married, had children, got divorced and then remarried later in life … clearly the younger Vonnegut is a man of significant substance on his own right!!

While it is interesting to read Vonnegut’s interpretations of his mania and how he deals with it, this is not the best account of mental illness that I have read. I think that Dr Cameron West’s memoir, First Person Plural, presents a clearer picture of what it is like to suffer with any sort of mental incapacity. What Vonnegut does present on the fringes of his memoir are allusions to his family and their life as a unit. I think that it is this subtext that is most interesting. From Mark’s account there is definitely a predisposition to mania in his family and he repeatedly points to those members of his clan who ‘heard voices’ or drank to escape those voices.

The writer himself is seemingly a likeable guy and like him I did. I wasn’t totally gripped by this book but I definitely thought it worth reading and would go so far as to recommend it to others.

An excerpt can be read here.

‘Escaping the Straightjacket‘ – Vonnegut’s struggle to stay sane.

‘Mark Vonnegut’s Sane Response to Psychosis.’

Father and son speak about mental illness here.

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

I have read quite a few books about addictions and have found each of them to fascinating for different reasons. However, Bill Clegg’s memoir is by far the clearest and most intriguing of all of the books of this genre that I have encountered.
Clegg’s account of his spiral into the abyss of crack cocaine is so vivid, told with such clarity, so intense that it is difficult to describe. I read the book in a state of awe. Although, not sure if “read” is the right verb … It was more like “gulping down”, imbibing, drowning. Clegg’s writing is a pleasure to read. The book is well structured and flows easily back and forth through time as Clegg tries to explain his fall from grace and the challenge of trying to convince himself that everything was ok, that he was not – as he calls it – “a junkie”.
There are numerous references to mirrors, inferences to what we choose to see and what we choose to ignore. The underlying idea is pretense, fakery, poor attempts at illusion and finally, desperation.
There are some stellar moments in this book, moments which take the readers’ breath away. There are also some shocking transgressions. But, even these become points of empathy for readers who find themselves inevitably relating, on some level, to Clegg’s battle with drugs, with himself.
This book is definitely one of my top books of the year. A must read for everyone.

Click to purchase this outstanding book.