3 Memoirs That Explore The Many Facets Of Mental Illness

Mental illness is a force field that enacts, on each person in its grip, an altered reality that is either seductive or oppressive, but always inescapable. It often leaves families, or in clearer moments, the individual, to wonder about why — the great why — they're tuned differently. I myself wonder about the wellspring of my mental illness, my mother's mental illness, my brother's, father's, friends', husband's, about how it is that the brain's compass spins. Mental illness is experienced by one in five Americans in any given year, according to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

Here come three lovely debut memoirs which are also detectivewas a 5th-generation New Yorker living in an old West Village brownstone. She was near the bottom of the pack in a blended family of six children, and on the outside, life was cozy: 30 kids in the neighborhood, and a green "jungle" behind the house in which to hide and seek and put on plays. But she could not tell time, felt erased, could not leave her mother lest her mother vanish into thin air. Stern's language is a child's, simple and affecting: