Inner Guide

A memoir that is both heartbreaking and heartwarming, Inner Guide tells the story of a child growing up with a schizophrenic mother. Told with wit, honesty and self-humour, it’s not a sad book, nor is it a book of self-pity.

Maris’ time travel back into her childhood self, gives insight into the thinking and emotions of a child slowly coming to understand and live with the fact that she has a ‘crazy’ mother – a mother whom it is impossible to please, as what pleases one minute can be something totally different the next. Watching from the side-lines as her Dad disappears from her life, she and her siblings are left alone to deal with a neurotic mother who sees everyone as the enemy.
On the one hand, an absorbing difficult to put down story, on the other a reflection on life questions. Offering moments of contemplation, on such things as spirituality and humanity, one finds oneself also pondering how to think about things. For example, is a bad mother really better than no mother? Is it best for adults to act towards a child that everything is fine and not speak about the elephant in the room?

Letters and reports from a children’s home, internal, and to the local city council, demonstrate that the authorities knew how neurotic Mari’s mother was. Everyone from neighbours, family, social workers and Churchgoers eventually gave up on being able to help. Yet Mari wasn’t aware that adults understood the situation until she was older. Her journey of ups and downs leads us into her slowly realising that what she experienced as normal was in fact not normal.

Along the way, we are given a window to look at certain aspects and attitudes in the 60s and 70s, and of life at different types of boarding school of the 70s.

Slowly Mari emerges from childhood dependency, to become a teenager who starts to question her situation and starts to realise she can have some say in the direction of her life. She realises that she can move on to ensure the past doesn’t prevent her future. In some mysterious way, there always seems to be some form of help, be it in the form of her best friend’s awkward father, or a dedicated, caring headmaster. She always seems to find an inner guide to keep her intact in a seemingly impossible situation.

Inner Guide is a voice for these times full of wisdom and self-knowledge it empowers the reader. You feel at times as if you are in an intimate conversation with the author. Like a story-teller of old, it takes you on an emotive journey that you don’t want to let go of until you reach the last page.