“Don’t worry Claire, you have my genes.” This said by my British astrophysicist father when I called to ask why he had failed to disclose my mother’s actual mental health diagnosis for several years. A man so reticent I didn’t even know he held the John D. MacArthur professorship at Caltech until I did a bit of sleuthing for my memoir, A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia. You can read the essay here.

“The night before picking up a copy of The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays , Esmé Weijun Wang’s essays on the subject of “the full psychotic spectrum” or what are called “the schizophrenias” (4), I anticipated its themes in a threatening dream related to my mother’s struggle with an illness that went undiagnosed for far too long.” You can read the essay here.