Memoir, Mental Illness, and Comedy: Excavating the Mother in Maria. In February 2025, I had the chance to have a powerful conversation with Maria Bamford about her brilliant memoir, Sure I’ll Join Your Cult . In the aftermath of the Eaton Fire, this interview feels like a bittersweet postscript to an era. After meeting through the vibrant community in Altadena we had the pleasure of orbiting each other for a while. We discuss our mothers, our favorite authors tackling nuance

Read the chapter excerpted from my memoir  A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia  at Joyland Magazine's website.

“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.

So grateful to Amelia Kennedy at Write or Die Tribe for writing "How Can We Both Love and Survive Our Parents? - A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of my Mother and Schizophrenia by Claire Phillips": a thoughtful review of my memoir which you can find on their site here. She likens the book to writing by Sylvia Plath and describes how the prose invites readers to "bond over the journey throughout the memoir and constantly details without overexplaining the stigma surro

On Sunday, May 16th I read an excerpt of A Room With a Darker View for LitFest Pasadena's livestreamed program of readings, poetry, film, panel discussions, and more. The program was diverse, ranging in conversations about social justice, cultural equity, race relations" to great words from author activists touching on "inclusivity in graphic novels, writing the SoCal experience, writing complicated families, speculative fiction, true crime, podcasting and 2020." This short