| Abstract |
Imagining Robert is a heartrending and ultimately uplifting book that tells the story of two brothers - one, an award-winning novelist; the other, an extraordinarily witty intelligent man who has suffered the ravages of chronic mental illness for more than three decades - and of how their love for one another has enabled them both to survive, and to thrive, in miraculous, surprising ways. In the extensive literature of mental illness, this book is unique: It is the first to tell us what it is like for the millions of families that must cope, day by day and year by year, over the course of a life-time, with a condition for which, in most cases, there is no solution. From his vantage inside the family, Neugeboren shares the anguish, the despair, the joys, the frustrations, the love. Imagining Robert is a family memoir that traces Robert and Jay's childhood in the years following World War II, and the different paths their lives have taken since Robert's first breakdown at the age of nineteen. It chronicles Robert's hospitalizations and struggles, the painfully terrifying treatments he has been subjected to - from lobotomy to shock therapy to megavitamins to insulin shock to psychoactive drugs - and his often wildly imaginative attempts to stay alive. And it tells of Jay's devotion to Robert, and his attempts, as Robert's caretaker, to make the system responsive to his brother's needs. |
