CRAZY LOVE: An Autobiographical Account of Marriage and Madness

Five years into their marriage Naylor's husband Ted, convinced of the Communist menace in his university department, positioned himself at their living room window with a rifle. . . and ate the first bullet. It was the beginning of a siege against paranoia, and this grim reminiscence, fifteen years later, is her ultimate reckoning with that debilitating experience. Coming from ""the most ordinary family in the entire Midwest"" with a B average and a high school education, she played Sheilah Graham to his Fitzgerald, acquiring opinions on western culture and writing for podunk magazines. He was eight years older, a wunderkind Ph.D. candidate with an I.Q. of 184, pushed by a father who taught him to brush his teeth to a mental count of eighteen and a mother who took pride in her odorless excrement. Naylor recaptures the roller-coaster days in all their maddening unpredictability: moments of clarity and regret preceding feeble suicide gestures; circular arguments and center-of-the-universe delusions; lovemaking in the afternoon followed by a search for bugging devices in the bed springs. Eventually, after he outwitted the sanatarium therapists at $2000 per month, she shipped him back to his parents and filed for divorce, but not without consequences; today, with a healthy husband and two growing sons, she still can't pass the shower stall without expecting a hanging body. One wonders, in these days of instant relief, what regular doses of tranquilizers might have done for him but Naylor isn't second-guessing and her correspondence with his family stopped years ago. A difficult book to categorize: overdone in spots but essentially honest throughout, with enough inherent suspense to keep the pages turning to the closing view of a sadly wasted personality.