Official Review: Nothing Like Normal
Posted: 07 Jun 2016, 08:14
[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Nothing Like Normal" by Martha Graham-Waldon.]
3 out of 4 stars
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Nothing Like Normal: Surviving a Sibling’s Schizophrenia is a poignant, aptly-titled memoir of a sister’s slow descent into schizophrenia by author Martha Graham-Waldon.
The Graham family was your typical middle-class American family consisting of two parents, brothers John and Charlie, two sisters, Kathy and Martha, as well as a menagerie of pets. The rambunctious family lived in Los Angeles with their father working full-time while their mother curbed her own creative ambitions to stay at home and raise the kids – their family more or less the real-life version of Father Knows Best, Make Room for Daddy and Leave it to Beaver, the golden age of television’s representation of the perfect nuclear family. The kids were close, especially Martha and her older sister, Kathy. Kathy was brave and outgoing, a leader and a mentor who excelled at sports, while Martha was quiet and introverted and perfectly content to follow her older sister around. In the sixties and early seventies, when family road trips were de rigueur, the Graham family certainly appeared to go on their fair share of them, with excursions taking them to Mexico, the Grand Canyon, the High Sierras, Arizona as well as several other states and even Canada. Their loving grandmother also contributed to each grandchild’s “cultural education” by financing each kids’ trip to Europe, heralding their right of passage into adulthood.
From the outside, it appeared that the Graham clan led a charmed life, with each of the kids urged to foster their respective talents through sports and other forms of creative endeavor. It seemed to everyone for a long time that the author’s sister, Kathy, excelled at all that she attempted. At first, there were a few uncharacteristic outbursts of anger that seemed to come out of nowhere like the time when Kathy hit her mother across the face, but after a time, the outbursts became angrier and more violent, culminating in Kathy beating up her friend on the beach. The author, always her sister’s follower, began to pull away from Kathy, shocked and mortified over her behavior, especially after her sister transferred to her school and began acting out. Kathy had always written poetry and after a time, her poems began to show signs of unhappiness and inexplicable discord. Her anger mounted and yet she couldn’t seem to articulate what was making her feel that way. However, it was the author’s own accident, when she had been struck by a car, that seemed to push her sister over that dark abyss which had subsequently led to her eventual institutionalization.
Nothing Like Normal has a blunt message that cannot be ignored; nothing can be normal again within a family unit when something like a serious illness takes hold of it. One also must keep in mind the time period in which Kathy’s mental breakdown manifested itself. It was the seventies, when free love and drugs reigned, but abortion and mental illness were taboo topics one didn’t discuss outside of the family. Patients with mental illness were locked up in institutions and treated with powerful drug cocktails that often left them in a zombie-like state. The author makes mention of Kathy’s zombie-like state when she was on her meds, juxtaposed by the times she purposefully went off her meds in order to feel ‘normal’ again, only to fall victim to the schizophrenia when it manifested itself once again. There were different institutions and various halfway houses throughout Kathy’s adult life, especially once the author’s father could no longer afford the more expensive institutions. The author’s mother coped as best she could with her other children but was unable to stop herself from lashing out at the author which eventually forced the author to leave home while still in her teens.
The Graham family continued to reach out to Kathy, to keep her engaged, yet Kathy seemed to want none of it as she fought the demons inside her head. Throughout her sister’s illness, Graham-Waldon fought her own love/hate battle with her sister over what she had become and what she had put her family through for indeed, nothing was, or ever would be, normal for them again. The book is simplistic in its prose with a fair amount of photos and poems from both the author and her sister scattered throughout the pages. It chronicles her sister’s descent down the dark hole of mental illness and her family’s reluctant journey with her. Understandably, there’s a sadness and poignancy as the reader reads her painful story. However, what would have made the book stronger would have been more details about the stigma of mental illness in society and more about the financial aspects of institutionalization and how that affected her family (the only reference to this was that the author’s father had taken out a second mortgage on the family home) and also how Kathy’s illness had impacted her two brothers. These added points would have better rounded out what is otherwise a wonderful, heart-felt memoir which is why I’m giving Nothing Like Normal 3 out of 4 stars.
******
Nothing Like Normal
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3 out of 4 stars
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Nothing Like Normal: Surviving a Sibling’s Schizophrenia is a poignant, aptly-titled memoir of a sister’s slow descent into schizophrenia by author Martha Graham-Waldon.
The Graham family was your typical middle-class American family consisting of two parents, brothers John and Charlie, two sisters, Kathy and Martha, as well as a menagerie of pets. The rambunctious family lived in Los Angeles with their father working full-time while their mother curbed her own creative ambitions to stay at home and raise the kids – their family more or less the real-life version of Father Knows Best, Make Room for Daddy and Leave it to Beaver, the golden age of television’s representation of the perfect nuclear family. The kids were close, especially Martha and her older sister, Kathy. Kathy was brave and outgoing, a leader and a mentor who excelled at sports, while Martha was quiet and introverted and perfectly content to follow her older sister around. In the sixties and early seventies, when family road trips were de rigueur, the Graham family certainly appeared to go on their fair share of them, with excursions taking them to Mexico, the Grand Canyon, the High Sierras, Arizona as well as several other states and even Canada. Their loving grandmother also contributed to each grandchild’s “cultural education” by financing each kids’ trip to Europe, heralding their right of passage into adulthood.
From the outside, it appeared that the Graham clan led a charmed life, with each of the kids urged to foster their respective talents through sports and other forms of creative endeavor. It seemed to everyone for a long time that the author’s sister, Kathy, excelled at all that she attempted. At first, there were a few uncharacteristic outbursts of anger that seemed to come out of nowhere like the time when Kathy hit her mother across the face, but after a time, the outbursts became angrier and more violent, culminating in Kathy beating up her friend on the beach. The author, always her sister’s follower, began to pull away from Kathy, shocked and mortified over her behavior, especially after her sister transferred to her school and began acting out. Kathy had always written poetry and after a time, her poems began to show signs of unhappiness and inexplicable discord. Her anger mounted and yet she couldn’t seem to articulate what was making her feel that way. However, it was the author’s own accident, when she had been struck by a car, that seemed to push her sister over that dark abyss which had subsequently led to her eventual institutionalization.
Nothing Like Normal has a blunt message that cannot be ignored; nothing can be normal again within a family unit when something like a serious illness takes hold of it. One also must keep in mind the time period in which Kathy’s mental breakdown manifested itself. It was the seventies, when free love and drugs reigned, but abortion and mental illness were taboo topics one didn’t discuss outside of the family. Patients with mental illness were locked up in institutions and treated with powerful drug cocktails that often left them in a zombie-like state. The author makes mention of Kathy’s zombie-like state when she was on her meds, juxtaposed by the times she purposefully went off her meds in order to feel ‘normal’ again, only to fall victim to the schizophrenia when it manifested itself once again. There were different institutions and various halfway houses throughout Kathy’s adult life, especially once the author’s father could no longer afford the more expensive institutions. The author’s mother coped as best she could with her other children but was unable to stop herself from lashing out at the author which eventually forced the author to leave home while still in her teens.
The Graham family continued to reach out to Kathy, to keep her engaged, yet Kathy seemed to want none of it as she fought the demons inside her head. Throughout her sister’s illness, Graham-Waldon fought her own love/hate battle with her sister over what she had become and what she had put her family through for indeed, nothing was, or ever would be, normal for them again. The book is simplistic in its prose with a fair amount of photos and poems from both the author and her sister scattered throughout the pages. It chronicles her sister’s descent down the dark hole of mental illness and her family’s reluctant journey with her. Understandably, there’s a sadness and poignancy as the reader reads her painful story. However, what would have made the book stronger would have been more details about the stigma of mental illness in society and more about the financial aspects of institutionalization and how that affected her family (the only reference to this was that the author’s father had taken out a second mortgage on the family home) and also how Kathy’s illness had impacted her two brothers. These added points would have better rounded out what is otherwise a wonderful, heart-felt memoir which is why I’m giving Nothing Like Normal 3 out of 4 stars.
******
Nothing Like Normal
View: on Bookshelves
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