SCHIZOPHRENIA DIGEST, Winter 2008
The power of brotherly love
My Brother's Madness: A Memoir
By Paul Pines (Curbstone Press, 2007)
Reviewed by Patricia Jane Teskey
This memoir engages the reader like a novel. The author, Paul, and his younger brother, Claude, grow up coping with a mother who abandons them, a stepmother who dislikes them, and a father who loves them, but fails to protect them. Claude's paranoid schizophrenia is just one strand weaving through a complex web of family relationships. Pines' use of subjective, sensory imagery to express the emotional atmosphere of his childhood, at times suggests a causal link between an emotionally painful childhood and the development of Claude's paranoid symptoms (though the author does not explicitly draw this conclusion). These childhood memories provide readers with a context for understanding the brothers' adult relationship. By the time their parents die and Paul becomes Claude's sole family caregiver, they have already established a pattern of reaching out to, and then rejecting, each other. Paul assumes the caregiver role with a mix of protective love and simmering anger that many family caregivers will identify with. Both brothers also make sharply astute observations about America's mental health system. They achieve bittersweet reconciliation before Claude dies, making this a story of grief and healing, told with stark and uncompromising honesty.
Patricia Jane Teskey, a freelance writer with a stronginterest in mental health issues, is based in Toronto, Ontario.
