Summary:

Wasted is the story of a young woman, now in her early twenties, that recounts her fourteen years spent "in the hell of eating disorders," having been bulimic by the age of nine, anorexic at fifteen. The book is also a chronicle of her six hospitalizations, one institutionalization, relentless therapy, the back and forth between being "well" then "sick" then "well" then "sicker." The author dismisses most common notions of persons with eating disorders, instead revealing a complex set of causes, some familial, some cultural, some wedded to her own personality.

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Prozac Nation is Wurtzel's memoir of her depression, which she traces from the age of 11 to her senior year in college in chapters marking different phases or manifestations of her illness. The book situates her illness squarely within her family dynamics where she found herself the "battlefield on which [her] parents' differences were fought," and describes in excruciating detail her inner life that at any given time was marked with a "free-flowing messy id" to nihilism, numbness, rage, and fear, ultimately leading to a suicide attempt. The last few chapters chronicle her slow "recovery," due to her conflicted relationship with psychopharmacology and an extraordinary psychiatrist.

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Retired professor Nariman Vakeel, suffering at 79 from Parkinson’s disease and a broken ankle that won’t heal, is more or less cast out of his home by his stepchildren to be cared for by his married daughter Roxana, her husband Yezad, and their two sons. The novel is a portrait of family life and the strife among siblings amidst moments of grace when an aging parent requires care; it is also a rich account of life in Bombay’s Parsi community in the mid-1990s.

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The Caregiver’s Tale: Loss and Renewal in Memoirs of Family Life is divided into three parts. The first section, “Care Situations,” provides the cultural context of illness and disability and focuses on four common family care situations: cancer, HIV/AIDS, mental illness/chemical dependence, and dementia. The second section of the book, “Care Relationships,” highlights patterns of caregiving, including caring for children, sibling care, couple care, and parent care. The third section of the book contains well over 100 annotations of memoirs of caregiving, each approximately a half-page in length.

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This story details several months in the life of a thirteen-year-old with incurable kidney disease and of her extended family--the policeman father who has cared for her since her mother ran off, the mother who reappears in time to learn she is the most likely donor, two sets of grandparents and several of the father's close friends. Two women in the father's life find their romantic attachments to him complicated by his role as his daughter's caretaker.

As Mary Grace's health deteriorates, her maturing accelerates. Each of the principal characters has to come to terms not only with impending loss, but with how this crisis reconfigures old patterns of family conflict and dependency. The story continues after her death as focus shifts to the father's grief, mourning, and new empathy with victims of accident and loss.

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This play in eight scenes presents the fictionalized character of Alice James, sister of Henry and William James, who after a sickly childhood, succumbed at 19 to a variety of vague and recurrent illnesses that made her a lifetime invalid. She died at 43 of breast cancer.

In a series of encounters (with her nurse; her father; her brother, Henry; several Victorian female figures: Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson, and mythological figures from Victorian fantasy fiction and from Parsifal; and a burglar), as well as a long dramatic monologue, her various forms of internal conflict are hilariously and poignantly articulated. They converge on the implications of her recurrently deciding whether or not to get out of bed and do something, and her confusion, often discussed by biographers and critics, about her place in her brilliant family, her vocation as a woman, and her own desires.

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This memoir by Joan Saltzman recounts her marriage, in her forties, to a man whose kidney disease was progressing to a point of choice between dialysis or transplant.  The first half of the book is a lively account of their somewhat stormy courtship, layered with memories of her childhood and reflections on tensions with and loss of her parents.  The second half focuses largely on the difficult decision to donate one of her own kidneys to her husband.  Even undergoing tests to determine she was a match required some wrestling with fear and resistance.  The chronicle continues through bumpy recoveries to a new level of intimacy and understanding of ongoing shared life in new terms.  Her idea of "complete recovery" had to be modified once she recognized that even a successful transplant doesn't restore a former state of health, but does restore a new range of possibilities.

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This impactful memoir recounts the events of the summer of 1996 when Greenberg's fifteen-year old daughter Sally "was struck mad," as he puts it (3).   Greenberg's portrayal of Sally's behavior as her illness erupts -seemingly from nowhere-- is staggeringly vivid and trustworthy, as is his description of the series of reactions that belong to him, the father who cannot protect, cannot even reach his daughter, although she sits beside him.   

A then-struggling writer, Greenberg unfolds the story, set in a ramshackle, five-story walk-up apartment in the Greenwich Village where he and his second wife (Sally's step-mother) reside.  Among the many rewards of this story is a colorful slice of a New York city life, around the block and in the locked ward.

Greenberg takes us through Sally's initial onset, her sleeplessness, grandiosity, delusions, and frantic drive to communicate, "a pile-up of words without sequence" (17).  The portrayal of his and his wife's initial shock; the diagnosis, "fulminating mania" with indicators for bipolar disorder; Sally's eventful hospitalization, and her return home in a medicated state that Greenberg finds almost as unsettling a transformation as the onset of the mania.  He details building a rapport with Sally's intriguing psychiatrist, as he observes Sally's efforts to do the same. Greenberg tells us about the day he decided to take Sally's medication -for a variety of understandable and also desperate reasons.  This sequence is brilliantly funny and poignant. And he gives us glimpses of the cost to his marriage of these events, bringing the stresses to light with astounding compassion for all concerned.

This memoir moves with exceptional grace between unfolding events and Greenberg's beautifully informed reflections on them.  Observations about the mental illness of James Joyce's daughter, Lucia, are woven through the text, as are insights and characterizations from other writers and doctors, like that of Eugen Bleuler who, Greenberg informs us, coined the word schizophrenia in 1911, when he observed that "in the end his patients were stranger to him than the birds in his garden.  But if they're strangers to us," Greenberg adds, "what are we to them? (24)" Perhaps the most gorgeous and unforgettable feature of the book is Greenberg's way with words, and his attentiveness to Sally's altered relation to words: "Afraid.  Frayed.  Why are you so a-frayed? She keeps asking" (25).

The story of this hard summer draws in a cast of compelling characters, including Michael's mother who arrives, it seems, from another world -of material comfort and propriety-bringing surprising sources of comfort to her adult son and to her granddaughter.  We also get to know Steve, Greenberg's older brother who, also suffering from mental illness, lives the life of a shut-in only blocks away from Michael, who brings him groceries and looks after him, at times a challenging job.

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Each poem in this collection is preceded by brief comments both by the author/patient and by her psychiatrist.  Together the poems chronicle incidents in the interior life of a woman who has lived with schizophrenia for 35 years, been hospitalized, changed doctors and medication, undergone intense feelings of isolation, and also has experienced remarkable support and love from a twin sister and a few loyal friends.  The poems range in tone from matter-of-fact tellings of psychotic episodes to reflections on relationships, both personal and professional, that have been important in the course of treatment.  The book is organized as a chronology that traces the trajectory of diagnosis, illness, treatment and recovery; the final section is entitled "Beginning Again."  Read in sequence, they give a rich sense of the writer's life, struggles, resilience, and unusual self-awareness.  

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When Gwen is twelve, her parents, suspecting her failure to show signs of normal adolescent development may be more serious than they had thought, have her tested and learn that she has Turner syndrome, a chromosomal disorder that frequently manifests in short stature, broad chest, low-set ears, amenorrhea and sterility. The diagnosis brings a new source of discord into an already somewhat dysfunctional New England family.  Gwen's mother, Paulette, prefers not to talk openly about Gwen's condition, or even, for a time, to admit it is real.  Her father, a scientist at MIT, is deeply interested in finding out more about it, but the clinical nature of his interest offends his wife.

Eventually the parents divorce, each to cope with different kinds of loneliness and alienation from Gwen and her two brothers.  One of those brothers, the designated achiever, is gay, but remains closeted for some years, in keeping with his mother's family culture.  The other, after a somewhat rebellious youth, marries a girl from blue-collar California, takes a teaching job, and eventually finds himself identifying with his son who receives a diagnosis of ADD not available during Scott's own youth.  The novel follows the individual stories of the five family members, each of whom carries his or her own burden of suffering, and brings them together during an unusual holiday gathering at the end, not for magical closure, but for a remarkable moment of retrospective understanding and opportunity for each to do some self-assessment and self-disclosure.

At the heart of the story is Gwen's "condition," recognized by all of them as the sadness that lies at the core of their family's chronic discomforts with one another.  Gwen herself finds her way into an authentic love relationship in her mid-thirties with a Caribbean diving guide she meets on a chartered excursion.  Though her mother is horrified and suspicious, and the rest of her family bemused, the experience of authentic love and friendship liberates Gwen from a history of self-defeating presumptions about her own limitations.

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