The Outsider
A Journey Into My Father's Struggle With Madness
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An unsentimental yet profoundly moving look at one family’s experience with mental illness.
“A haunting, poignant story of a son’s life with, and without, his father. A rare and moving portrait of one of life’s major struggles—the devastation created by severe mental illness.” —John Oldham, M.D., Director of New York State Psychiatric Institute
In 1978, Charles Lachenmeyer was a happily married professor of sociology who lived in the New York suburbs with his wife and nine-year-old son, Nathaniel. But within a few short years, schizophrenia—a devastating mental illness with no known cure—would cost him everything: his sanity, his career, his family, even the roof over his head. Upon learning of his father’s death in 1995, Nathaniel set out to search for the truth behind his father’s haunted, solitary existence.
Rich in imagery and poignant symbolism, The Outsider is a beautifully written memoir of a father’s struggle to survive with dignity, and a son’s struggle to know the father he lost to schizophrenia long before he finally lost him to death.
• Recipient of the Kenneth Johnson Memorial Research Library Book Award
• Winner of the 2000 Bell of Hope Award
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Writing with compassion and candor, Lachenmeyer seeks to understand his father, Charles, a professor of sociology and a complex puzzle of a man who slowly lost his agonizing fight with schizophrenia and died in 1995. Drawing upon the older man's letters to explore his emotional demons, Lachenmeyer discloses that his father's condition deteriorated when Charles was dismissed from Hunter College in 1975 and his mother died later that same year. Although Charles remained optimistic that he could reverse his fortunes, even after losing several other teaching jobs in New York colleges in the 1970s and 1980s, his condition precipitated the loss of his home, marriage and child just two months short of his 38th birthday in 1981. Lachenmeyer admits to his own confusion and bitterness when confronted with Charles's odd behavior, which caused him to sever all ties between them in 1989, when the author was 20. In one letter to his embattled father he wrote: "I cannot live in your world; you cannot live in mine." Eventually, Charles became obsessed with an evil government conspiracy to enslave the world, working briefly as a part-time cab driver before living on the streets. Through interviews with family, friends, former colleagues and medical personnel, Lachenmeyer constructs a heartrending portrait of a man whose emotional illness eventually robbed him of everything, counterbalanced in part by the author's gradual understanding of the plight of homeless people, who are often the victims of madness and misfortune.
