You can pre-order A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of my Mother and Schizophrenia here at Skylight's website, and accompany us on the day of the book’s release: Tuesday, August 18, 2020 at 6:30pm!
This event will take place live on Crowdcast, visit Skylight's event page at this link. Please RSVP to save your spot, receive email updates, and reminders leading up to the day of the event via Crowdcast so you don't miss anything.
I’ll be joined by Emily Rapp Black, the author of Poster Child: A Memoir and The Still Point of the Turning World, a New York Times Bestseller, an Editor's Pick, and a finalist for the PEN Center Literary Award in Nonfiction.
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Told in fragments, flashbacks, and chronicling the most extreme but unfortunately common aspects of schizophrenia, this elegantly written memoir is a reflection on illness, shame, and the generation gaps that have defined mother-daughter relationships amid the evolution of feminism in the 20th century. Like Anne Boyer's lauded memoir, The Undying, A Room with a Darker View is not a linear tale of redemption or restitution. Rather, it challenges conceptions about mental illness, difficulties caring for an aging parent with a chronic disease, and how we frame contributions by outliers to society, while offering a scathing look at a broken medical system, the unwillingness of an elite educated family to reckon with its secrets, and finally, the universally-understood difficulty of caring for an aging parent with a chronic illness.
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Praise for A Room with a Darker View: An engrossing story of identity formation, Phillips ultimately gives us not a confessional memoir but a parable of agency and resilience amid uncertain reality. As a speculative fiction writer whose work is rooted in an encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction, she crafts a tale of time travel, one where past-present-futures collapse into braided familial, personal, and social histories. Throughout the book Phillips illuminates the fierce reality of her mother’s delusions as well as the tools she gives her daughter to survive her. –Connie Samaras As heroic as it is original, Claire Phillips’ writing always finds the scary corners that would be secret to any other author, from which inevitably there comes into vision a revelatory perspective. Reading A Room with a Darker View, you won’t shake it from your mind; finishing it, you won’t shake it from your memory. – Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville and Shadowbahn Short, distilled chapters of quietly tantalizing prose grip us throughout the span of Claire Phillips’ fully realized and haunting story. –Bruce Bauman, author of And the Word Was and Broken Sleep
