The Turkeys Came to Berkeley: A Manic Search for Home - Softcover

Allen Jr., Mr Michael J.

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798262149186

Publisher: Independently published, 2025

Synopsis

What does it mean to lose your mind—and still find your way home?

In The Turkeys Came to Berkeley: A Manic Search for Home, Marine Corps veteran Michael J. Allen Jr. delivers a searing and unforgettable memoir of madness, meaning, and survival. With the raw honesty of someone who has lived on the edge of reality, Allen takes readers inside psychiatric wards, ambulance rides, and city streets where the line between delusion and vision blurs. His prose is electric—visceral scenes of cuffs, needles, and hallucinations balanced against moments of lucidity, love, and unexpected grace.

This is not just a story of collapse. It is a story of return. A wife who never stopped believing. A son who became a king in his father’s eyes. Fellow veterans who carried him back to himself when medicine and restraint could not. Rivers, turkeys, dogs, and laughter that stitched the soul together in the aftermath of psychosis.

The Turkeys Came to Berkeley is more than a memoir—it is a declaration. A testament that we are not burdens, not broken, not disposable. We are built of stardust and storms. We are matter. And we matter.

For readers of Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias, Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, this slim yet powerful memoir is destined to be underlined, highlighted, and carried close to the heart.

Read it in one sitting. Carry it for a lifetime.

Edition details

• Publisher: Independently published
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798262149186
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120