Quiet-Crazy: A Novel - Hardcover

Barrett, Joyce Durham

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0945575432 ISBN 13: 9780945575436

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 1993

Synopsis

The sheriff has come to "put away" Elizabeth Miller--to take her to the state mental hospital. "Well, I may be crazy," Elizabeth tells us, "but I know I'm not wild-crazy, just maybe quiet-crazy, and I don't know which one is worse." For someone about to be penned up with the "crazy folks," you wouldn't think she'd be so calm and analytical. But Elizabeth Miller knows that her trip to the asylum is her last chance at an independent life, her last chance at getting away from Angela--the little dead girl inside her who won't die, who threatens to take over her life. In the hospital, she will find beauty and terror, but most of all, she will find her own inner strength--the strength to heal herself and to face the family and small town she has had to flee. Joyce Durham Barrett's debut novel is the uplifting story of one woman who triuimphs of a terrible past and wakes up to find the world as an adult: ready to embrace it in all its complications, its many shades of meaning and uncertainty, its degrees of good and bad, its wild, wonderful, terrifying, thrilling reality.

About this title

About the Author

Joyce Durham Barrett lives in Griffin, Georgia.

From Kirkus Reviews

A mental hospital helps a severely depressed young woman take charge of her life--in a heartfelt but uninspired first novel from children's book author Barrett. Elizabeth Miller has stopped working at the pants factory in her small southern town, so depressed that she sleeps all the time in the family home where she lives with her well-meaning but ineffectual father and the domineering mother who is the cause of all her problems. Years before, Vera Miller had accidentally killed Elizabeth's older sister Angela, then a small child, by backing over her in the car. From that point, Vera has raised Elizabeth as a substitute for her vanished angel, always thinking Angela, not Elizabeth. The result is a 28-year-old who is ``half-woman, half- child,'' who has never dated, who has zero self-esteem, who is a domestic slave: ``All my life I've been going and getting for Mama.'' Then, encouraged by sympathetic Aunt Lona, she enters the hospital and begins to discard Angela and become Elizabeth, even breaking her self-imposed taboo by revealing that her mother had her suck at her breast when she was a six-year-old. Elizabeth tells us her story at an excruciatingly slow pace. All the emphasis is on the heavy lifting she has to do to develop her identity; hospital, staff, and patients are poorly characterized. The staff are a mixed bag (Elizabeth blooms under the care of Dr. Adams but is propositioned by Dr. Johnstone) and her fellow-patients sketchy outlines; the suicide of her favorite, Hemp, is a non-event. At the close, Elizabeth heads out to enjoy her new-found freedom. Whatever the actual case, this reads like autobiography: therapy for the author, perhaps, but slim pickings for the reader. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0945575432
• ISBN 13: 9780945575436
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 308