This book was amazing!!! What a read!! The author held nothing back when writing about her uncle. What a character! This book had me laughing, crying and going through a variety of emotions. Very good and honest look at mental illness and the various ways it touches the person who has it as well as other's around them. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book in return for my honest review.

This is a very odd book. It’s touted at a true story taken from the author’s memoir he sent to her. But the whole thing is very sensationalized, racist, and uncomfortable.

Bob recounts his childhood which was filled with dysfunction and drugs. I couldn’t get past this part. I was hoping for a look into the mind of some with schizophrenia, but the introduction and beginning chapters clearly make this more an exposé on this author’s family. (Other reviews seem to say the same thing, solidifying my decision not to finish it.)

I was having very conflicting feelings about this book for most of the time I was reading it. Until I got to the very end, I was a little shocked with how it included appropriation, classism, racism, sexism, etc. The chapters alternate between Sandra's voice and her uncle, Bob's, with Sandra using her voice to explain the reasoning and research she did to clarify Bob's portions. 4 stars for originality in presentation and faithfully sticking to the facts as written by Bob.

The true and heartbreaking story about a man suffering with schizophrenia, told from both his point of view and that of the author, his niece.

This is an honest look at the treatment of mental health issues both in the medical system and by families. This is a special sort of book that is unlike anything I've read before.

Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and Sandra Allen for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This is a different look at a life of mental illness told in kind of a unique way, as it was typed over a long time by the man with the illness. Then much later the manuscript was mailed without warning to his niece who'd recently finished college and was starting out as a writer. She was floored by getting it at first, thinking it was just bizarreness and put it aside. Then she eventually took a deeper look and spent some time going through it and just reading the story. She was completely pulled into it of course before long because this was her family member, and they did have some shared memories and fondness. She was curious about what might have happened to cause him to be the way he was, or to have helped perhaps to make him that way. Many of the things she read about that Uncle Bob went through were awful, he was already having problems when his parents split and neither seemed to be want to be bothered with him at the time. He was dumped at a mental hospital by his father at just 16 years old and not even told what the place was so his dad could go off to Lake Tahoe with his most recent new girlfriend for a couple of weeks of childfree fun. His father just drove away, not even telling him why he was there, or if he was coming back for him.

Bob spends years, and then decades in and out of facilities and on different combinations of medications with varying degrees of success. When they have it dialed in right, he does really, really, well, but that's all too rare. When they have it not so right, he is usually overmedicated and in zombie-like condition. When he goes completely off the medication, that's when he really goes off the rails and usually ends up in serious trouble, like jail or winds up in the hospital, where they have to sedate him and get him calmed down again.

The author starts checking the various stories out and writing, then continuing to write. Before she was finished, much time had passed. Years. And before she knew it, Bob had passed away while there were still things she wanted to ask questions about. She had interviewed almost all of the people in the book who were still alive, to verify what she could of what he had written about. I'd recommend this for anyone with an interest in mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar, that type of thing. I found it to be a fascinating read. Thanks for reading.

An advance digital copy was provided by NetGalley for my review by NetGalley, the author Sandra Allen Scribner, and the publisher Scribner.

This book had potential, but unfortunately, there are far too many elements that just don't work. Others have mentioned the problems with appropriation and filtering Bob's story through the author's sensibility, and while those are certainly relevant, the larger issues are that the story is repetitious, uninteresting, clichéd, and written in a style I can only call 'high school diary'. While I assumed (and had hoped) that Bob would tell his own story, with an occasional footnote or clarification, there are very few citations from Bob's original manuscript, and those are predominantly fragmentary and crudely rendered - which call into question large sections of the book which detail entire conversations and minute details that don't seem to have any basis. Also, when the author tries to insert useful background material, for example on the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the early '70's, or the history of psychotropics, it seems drily cobbled from Wikipedia entries. Being the exact same age as Bob, and growing up in the same area (I have even been to the facility on La Casa Via in my hometown of Walnut Creek that figures prominently), I was hoping I could find a connection at least on that level. It's a sad story, but one gleans virtually no new insights into mental illness from it.

My thanks anyway to Netgalley and Scribner for providing me with an advanced reading copy, in exchange for this (brutally) honest review.

Review copy provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This was an interesting look into paranoid schizophrenia. It wasn't mind blowing but it was what I expected and I enjoyed it overall.

A big thank you to Sandra Allen, Scribner, and Netgalley for the free copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

First I'd like to tell Allen I appreciate her courage in telling her uncle's story. Sadly if he had cancer, or was paralyzed, or something along those lines, he would have been accepted by society; but to say, "my uncle was schizophrenic", most people's immediate reaction is repugnance and fear. I'm bipola, which falls under the same diagnostic umbrella. I was finally diagnosed about ten years ago. And I am certainly not ashamed. But people harass me mercilessly. Well, either that or constantly criticize my life choices many of which are made compulsively. Reading this book made me feel so lucky that I can experience treatment of the year 2017, not the year 1972. What an amazing difference that amount of years has made. His stays in hospital sounded utterly traumatic. I don't see how they didn't all lead to complete dis pair.

It was obvious that regardless of any arguments or loss of contact he loved his family very much, and he was so fortunate to have you, Allen, to tell his tragic story. It could start the healing process for thousands out there just like him.

"All those fuckers...all of them with their clicking pens and quiet judgment, all of them did not get it. There was something in the sky. This was the best moment of Bob's life so far. This was when he realized that, no matter what, there was something bigger than all of this. There was an energy ray in the heavens and it had elected to come down and touch him."

Author Sandra Allen didn't know her uncle Bob very well, but what she knew hinted at the mysterious and misunderstood. Her mother's brother was referred to simply as "crazy," and lived like a hermit in an isolated part of California.

Learning that Sandra is enrolled in a writing program in Iowa, Bob calls and tells her he's done some life writing, then thanks her profusely. Unsure why, she figures it out when his manuscript unexpectedly arrives in the mail.

"I have often looked back and tried to remember what I thought the word 'schizophrenia' meant before Bob sent his manuscript to me. I've asked myself what images flashed through my mind when I first read the phrase he typed on his manuscript's cover page: psychotic paranoid schizophrenic."

At first, she's disoriented by the all-caps typing, myriad misspellings, and the lingering reek of cigarette smoke; after slogging through some of its pages, she's repelled by the blunt language and storytelling, including some racist and culturally insensitive expressions and anecdotes. She avoids thinking about it for awhile, likewise avoiding Bob's questions about if she's read it.

Eventually curiosity gets the best of her, and she makes her way through, agreeing with Bob that his story deserves to be told. Growing up in Berkeley in the turbulent decades of the 1960s and '70s, Bob's emerging mental troubles would disastrously coincide with the era's proliferating drug use, ending with several stays in mental hospitals and numerous frightening, confusing, and at times exhilarating events for Bob. He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, and certainly his recreational drug use didn't help the problem. It seems possible he might've indulged in order to relieve his symptoms.

The fact that Allen undertook this project, fulfilling her uncle's wish to get his story "out there," and I'm sure to be better understood by a society that he'd always occupied the fringes of, is highly admirable.
Allen also did great work in researching and interviewing mental health professionals who offered opinions on treatment and its evolution across decades, and in gathering statistics and facts to hammer home the important, often ignored points of this frequently misunderstood illness. Again, admirable and necessary. These chapters on the science behind schizophrenia and social ramifications of mental illness in the United States alternate with those of Bob's rambling, sprawling writings and Sandra's careful fact-checking and questioning missions within their family.

"Many feel that those seeking to help individuals perceived to be abnormal or experiencing mental or emotional distress shouldn't seek to diagnose them, to call some of their behaviors or experiences 'symptoms' and try to fit them into one box or another. Rather, those seeking to provide mental health care should work to better understand the various contexts in which people actually live - for example, the deleterious effects of poverty, racism, sexism, bullying, and other traumas."

But still it feels somehow unfinished. Even in interviews with family members who explain what they remember about episodes in Bob's life, there's a lack of emotions, a lack of the reflective commentary that often comes with distance. Allen herself shies from expressing her feelings, besides to say she felt embarrassed at not always returning Bob's calls or speaking directly enough with him about what she intended to do with his writings. She veers away from confronting some emotions head on, and that left the story lacking.

As for Bob's writings, I can't imagine the massive task she faced in deciphering his misspellings and harried, incoherent stories. At times much of the narrative was nearly incoherent even in its cleaned-up form. But I was just so confused reading it.

Lest I sound too critical, I do believe it's a story that needed told, that it's painful for everyone connected to it, and that we need much more transparency in terms of mental health issues and treatment in the United States. The stigma surrounding these is ludicrous and comically outdated. I just didn't find the jumbled format and emotional remove of the family members as helpful in bridging that divide, I felt heavily sad without any redeeming hopefulness by the end, and often I wasn't even sure exactly what I'd read or understood.

But it does contain some beautiful, bittersweet moments, like when Bob's mother, Marilyn, shows Sandra a Dear Abby newspaper clipping she's saved for years, written by another mother with a schizophrenic son.

"No one should have to endure what schizophrenia does to the mind, but worse is what society does to its sufferers," she had written. "If my son had been stricken with cancer, he would have received sympathy. Because he suffered instead from a mental illness that sometimes made him do weird things, he was treated as less than an animal by some people. Professionals in the judicial system called him a 'sorry piece of human flesh.'" This woman wrote that her son had often expressed a wish to fall asleep and never wake up, and that he had died in his sleep some years before.

Marilyn had underlined a part farther down in which the woman implored Abby to tell her readers to learn about mental illnesses, which affect one in four American families. "Look beyond the illness to the inner person. They need friends."

Marilyn patted this scrap of paper into my palm and looked me in the eyes.

It's a moment that comes to me often when I think about why it's so hard for some people to hear or say the word "schizophrenia."

And it's why we need every work or project that speaks out about this painful, misunderstood topic.

A creative, chaotic look at schizophrenia and its toll on one man's life, and that life through his family's eyes.

Sandra Allen received a phone call from her uncle Bob in which he asks her for her address so he can mail her a copy of his autobiography he wrote. When she receives it she is reluctant to read the full autobiography let alone edit it or help me re-write it. As time goes by she does read it and eventually does vast research into his diagnosis, the diagnosis of schizophrenia, and her family. While she is still unsure of what was truth and what might have been Bob's delusions, she told his story in a very beautiful and sympathetic way. Ms. Allen did not simply edit or rewrite Bob's story, she includes chapters in which she shares conversations she had with family related to what Bob had written. She realized many in her family might not be happy with her writing this story and Sandra mentions there are some ill feelings about the book. Kudos to her for standing strong and standing by her uncle Bob. The majority of the story is set in Bob's mid-teens to mid 20's. Sandra mentions that what he wrote after that time is limited. The 1990's was written on one page. The 80's seems to be mostly what was going Additionally, it was interesting learning how people with his diagnosis and similar diagnosis were treated during that period of time. I give this book a solid 4 stars.