About this Book

"A Room with a Darker View is an unflinching, feminist work chronicling the author's troubled relationship with her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer, whose severe illness--marked by manic bouts of laughter, delusions, and florid hallucinations--went unrecognized for decades. This elegantly written memoir challenges conceptions about mental illness, difficulties caring for an aging parent with a chronic disease, and how we frame contributions by outliers to society. Fragmented vignettes tell the story of undiagnosed mental illness besieging a mother-daughter relationship, using flashbacks to tonally convey the extreme but unfortunately common aspects of schizophrenia. A Room with a Darker View is part illness narrative, part reflection on shame, ethnicity, and the generation gaps that have defined mother-daughter relationships amid the evolution of feminism in the twentieth century. Only with her mother's final relapse at age seventy-three did the author begin to tell this story, first in Black Clock magazine, an essay for which she received a Pushcart nomination and notable mention in The Best American Essays 2015"--