Relative Stranger: Piecing Together a Life Plagued by Madness - Softcover

Loudon, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184767173X ISBN 13: 9781847671738

Publisher: Canongate U.S., 2008

Synopsis

Smart, affecting, and self-critically probing: a balm for anyone who has lost a loved one long before death.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Loudon’s book is a moving and loving testament to a messy, complicated life. A- Entertainment Weekly

Relative Stranger is the powerful, uncompromising memoir of Mary Loudon’s search to understand the facts about the deeply troubling final years of her dead sister, Catherine. Mary, the youngest in a happy, upper-middle-class London family, had not seen Catherine for what would be the last twelve years of Catherine’s life. After discovering that Catherine had been inhabiting the identity” of a man called Stevie, Mary plunges into a postmortem investigation, interviewing doctors, nurses, social-services representatives, nuns, café owners, grocers, and ministers who knew Catherine. Loudon paints a portrait that lays bare the pain of schizophrenia as well as its vexing complexities. In the vein of Jeanette Walls’s best-selling memoir, The Glass Castle, Relative Stranger is an honest account of how schizophrenia affected a promising young life while exploring the assumptions people make about mental illness and what it means to love, to lose, to die, and, above all, to belong.

About this title

Review

"In Crisp prose, she pieces together Catherine's missing years. . . . Loudon's book is a moving and loving testament to a messy, complicated life. A-"

"Quietly astonishing . . . A finely written ode to a tough, indomitable woman that reveals how the bonds of familial love can survive even a nearly lifelong separation."

"A gifted writer . . . With great passion, Loudon attempts in spare, incisive prose to reconstruct the life to which her sister painfully denied her access. . . . Smart, affecting, and self-critically probing: a balm for anyone who has lost a loved one long before death."

"People as empathic as Mary Loudon are rare. Writers as incisive and clean are even rarer. Her loving, sharp, elucidating journey into the mind of madness is a testament to the power of understanding, and to how far determination can take us all in the quest to touch the singular beauty and loneliness of another human soul."

About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate U.S.
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 184767173X
• ISBN 13: 9781847671738
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352