Author’s Note
As a reader, I’ve always been drawn to autobiographical writing —the personal diaries, letters, journals—of artists and philosophers in particular. Through books of this genre I’ve drawn inspiration for living, learned to take my own life seriously, to cherish its lessons and evaluate it in terms that are large and magical.
There is no family life without strife, but introduce mental illness and you have family life of mythic proportions, a life in which bitterness and sweetness are forever intertwined. Growing up with a father afflicted with mental illness is to grow up in an emotional environment where the sands are constantly shifting. From the perspective of a child, a parent with mental illness is more a force of Nature than a person, and the fear and wonder one feels in the presence of the afflicted can be as mysterious as it is overwhelming.
Will the mystery of the mind gone mad ever be revealed? Will we ever find a cure? Some say yes. Sadly, given what I see in the realm of treatment and care for the acutely mentally ill, I am not so optimistic.
But my intent is neither to judge nor to condemn. Instead, just as wandering bards of old sang of their ancestors, I tell this intensely personal story hoping it might serve as allegory. All domestic violence, all religious intolerance, all racial and gender bigotry is kin to madness. The irony is, no one is ever conquered: no man ever truly conquers a woman, no woman a man, no demagogue ever affects genuine conversion, no race ever fully enslaves another. The true self waits in silence, emerging, when the battle ends, to define itself.
—Dolores Brandon
Brooklyn, New York
1999