Memoirs
Description
Claire Phillips’ elegantly written and unflinching memoir about her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer diagnosed in mid-life with paranoid schizophrenia, challenges current conceptions about mental illness, relapse and recovery, as well as difficulties caring for an aging parent with a chronic disease. Told in fragments, the work reflects back to her family history in England and Zimbabwe, where she visits to learn about the medical legacy of her grandfather, Michael Gelfand. As she breaks the family silence about her mother’s schizophrenia, Phillips reframes hospitalizations, paranoia, illness, and caregiving through a feminist lens.
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Endorsements
As heroic as it is original, Claire Phillips’ writing always finds the scary corners that would be secret to any other author, from which inevitably there comes into vision a revelatory perspective. Reading A Room With a Darker View, you won’t shake it from your mind; finishing it, you won’t shake it from your memory.
– Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville and Shadowbahn
A moving portrait of her mother and their relationship, A Room with a Darker View is a book that people who are going through something similar need to read. Mental illness is a story, like everyone’s life is a story…. Many people don’t want to talk about death or illness, they want to talk about the heroics. But I think some of the heroics are just telling these stories. In this book, Phillips’ mother has a full life.
– Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of a Turning World
An engrossing story of identity formation, Phillips ultimately gives us not a confessional memoir but a parable of agency and resilience amid uncertain reality. As a speculative fiction writer whose work is rooted in an encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction, she crafts a tale of time travel, one where past-present-futures collapse into braided familial, personal, and social histories. Throughout the book Phillips illuminates the fierce reality of her mother Joy’s delusions as well as the tools she gives her daughter to survive her.
– Connie Samaras
Short, distilled chapters of quietly tantalizing prose grip us throughout the span of Claire Phillips’ fully realized and haunting story.
– Bruce Bauman, author of And the Word Was and Broken Sleep
Reviews
An inventively told and wholly original memoir.
– David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
Read Claire Phillips’ playlist for their Book Notes series.
Author Biography
Claire Phillips is co-founder and director of the Los Angeles Writers Reading Series, is the author of the novella Black Market Babies (11th Hour Press, 1998) and as a young poet at San Francisco State won the First Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She is a regular contributor to Black Clock magazine, where her essay "Hanging from the Chandeliers" appeared and then received a Pushcart nomination and notable mention in The Best American Essays 2015. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Motherboard-Vice and can be heard on the KQED Writers' Block and found at viralnet.net. In May 2019 she read in Jill Soloway's famed Sit n' Spin series on the Comedy Central stage. She resides in Los Angeles where she teaches critical and creative writing at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts), the Southern California Institute for Architecture (SCI-Arc), and at UC Irvine. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from New York University, and a BA in English from San Francisco State University.
Copyright Information
©2020 Claire Phillips
DoppelHouse Press
DOPPELHOUSE PRESS is a character-driven publisher that focuses on memoir, art, architecture, design, and music, often encompassing forces behind migration and diaspora. Our mission is to bring together a plurality of voices to examine the dynamics between sociopolitical forces and aesthetic forms. The support of human rights and self-determination, untangling historical misperceptions, and providing alternate perspectives has been an equally important goal. Our books hinge around art and bravery, conviction and perseverance, defiance, hope, and the personal stories of people who seek to imagine a better world. DoppelHouse Press books are distributed to the trade by Consortium / Ingram. Contact:Publisher@DoppelHousePress.com | T: +1 424-258-4423 | F: +1 323-349-0985
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher DoppelHouse Press
- Publication Date August 2020
- Orginal LanguageEnglish
- ISBN/Identifier 9781733957908
- Publication Country or regionUnited States
- FormatPaperback
- Primary Price 18.95 USD
- Pages272
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusPublished
- Original Language TitleA Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia
- Original Language AuthorsClaire Phillips
- Copyright Year2020
- Dimensions8x5.2 inches
- Illustration1 Black and White illustration
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