An affecting, honest memoir useful to anyone trying to understand life with psychosis.
In this debut memoir, a woman describes how she came to understand, treat and live successfully with her mental illness.
At first, this memoir’s narrative is difficult to piece together, as it bounces among the author’s memories of her first stay in a mental hospital; her career as a waitress; and stories of her high school boyfriend and her mother’s abusive boyfriend, among other things. However, readers soon begin to understand how fractured, abusive and sad Joiner’s childhood often was, due to her alcoholic mother, distant father and disastrous stepfathers. She began to have paranoid thoughts in high school, and by age 19, she suffered from delusions, including the belief that the Four Seasons’ 1962 song “Sherry,” which she heard on the radio, was “someone singing about me.” Soon, she believed that she was a movie star, that she was Jesus Christ, and that she could control John Kennedy’s and Robert Kennedy’s spirits. She shuffled among various jobs (waitressing, topless dancing, and, later, working as a preschool teacher and a nurse’s aide) as well as different men. She also repeatedly attempted suicide and underwent five different stints in an asylum. She developed a combination of work, creativity, exercise, therapy, and medication and created “Sherry’s Master Plan”—a method of meticulously recording and evaluating her daily achievements—that enabled her to get through each day. The book becomes more coherent as it goes on, as Joiner shines a light into the dark, frightening world of psychosis and its twisted logic. The prose is often beautiful, if harrowing, and readers will have sympathy for Joiner’s utter determination to find a way to live with her condition. The author’s stubborn courage is also admirable; for example, in 1972, she fought for equal pay for equal work, winning a settlement against a pizza place that paid her less because she was female. “I might have been ill, but for once, I knew I was right,” she says.
An affecting, honest memoir useful to anyone trying to understand life with psychosis.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490315133
Page Count: 270
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This long but never dull synthesis of research on memory from the late 19th century to the present provides a host of interesting facts and insights into how our recollections are formed, maintained, retrieved, and sometimes distorted or forgotten. Personal memories, both conscious and unconscious, greatly influence our actions, habits, and values. Yet what exactly is memory? A professor of psychology at Harvard, Schacter skillfully bridges the disciplines of cognitive neuroscience and psychology in summarizing the neurological, hormonal, and emotional bases of memory. He also clearly distinguishes among several kinds of recollections, including semantic (cognitive) and procedural (task- oriented), as well as field versus observer (in the former, one is part of the recollected scene; in the latter, one isn't). Schacter is also very informative on pseudo-memories, noting the susceptibility of many young children to suggestive questioning and of some adults to hypnosis; psychogenic, or trauma-induced, amnesia; the recurrent intrusive memories found in post-traumatic stress disorder; the controversy between believers in and critics of ``recovered memory'' (memories, usually of sexual abuse, retrieved through hypnosis or other therapeutic techniques); and myths and realities concerning how aging affects memory. Schacter repeatedly notes how fragile memory is: It hardly provides a camcorder-like reflection of the past. Concerning flashbacks of a traumatic event, for example, he writes that ``[their] content may say more about what a person believes or fears than about what actually happened.'' His narrative style is superb, balancing clear scientific journalism with interesting anecdotal material. Contemporary art focusing on the themes of memory and forgetting provides a vivid counterpoint. In short, a highly readable, intellectually rich, and altogether memorable work.
Pub Date: June 19, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-02502-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
Meandering millennial meditations by a self-described cultural historian, WissenskÅnstler, Marshall McLuhanite, and yogic proselytizer. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that this book is more stream-of-consciousness than history of consciousness, as Thompson (The American Replacement of Nature, 1991, etc.) jettisons such Western prejudices as order and coherence while he whimsically skips from Proust to Earth Goddesses to the Rig Veda to comparing translations of Lao Tzu. When Joseph Campbell engages in such dazzling eclecticism, it usually works. Here it seems misconceived. Electrified by the constructed significance of the year 2000, Thompson also succumbs to an apocalyptic variant of the Whig fallacy of history. Instead of viewing the present as the grand culmination of centuries of meliorations, he sees it as the beginning of a final transformation of humanity involving ``the recovering of the feminine, the deconstruction of the patriarchy, the deconstruction of capital-incentive economies of scale run by military-athletic-entertainment-industrial complexes with their shadow economies of drugs, arms traffic and crime; and a general resistance to medibusiness taking over the human body.'' If we do not throw off all these old bonds, if we do not subjugate science to ancient wisdom, Thompson predicts a violent, long-drawn disintegration of civil society, ``darkness and entropy in a war of each against all.'' In any book so fruitcake-rich with ideas and theories, you're bound to find at least a few tasty morsels, and Thompson does not disappoint. He offers some provocative—though unoriginal—ideas on the evolution of consciousness, and his discussion of the limits and fallibilities of academia and science is first-rate. But the healthy skepticism he shows here completely vanishes when it comes to matters more mysterious and arcane. Things must be in a pretty bad way if science and reason cannot save us, and we must cast ourselves instead on Thompson's haphazard ruminations. (18 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: June 24, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-15834-3
Page Count: 284
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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