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Description edit
Two not unrelated challenges--being novelist Kurt Vonnegut's son and suffering episodes of schizophrenia--shape, but don't confine, this mordantly witty, slightly subversive memoir. Vonnegut (The Eden Express) weathered a scruffy childhood with his as yet obscure dad ("I'll always remember my... read more
Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit
Characters/People edit
- Kurt: a genious
- Max: Add a description of this character.
- Malvesti
- Bernie
- Steve
- Jim
- Vinny
- Mark Vonnegut
- Jane
- Barb Vonnegut
- Helen
Quotes edit
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“P.xii: It helps a lot if others don't give up on you.”
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“P.xiii: Until we come up with an unequivocal blood test or the equivalent, we're all blowing smoke and don't know if what we call schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are one disorder or a dozen.”
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“P.xiv: Most adults have forgotten what they had to do to survive childhood.”
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“P.xvi: There's an unfortunate hustle built into medical care, which favours doing things over not doing things. Most medical care is delivered by a provider who doesn't know the patient and will never see him again. Doing things is more comfortable than not doing things. Doctors have much more at stake in their relationships with insurers and business managers than in their relationships with patients.”
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“P.xviii: Of course I'm trying to save the world. What else would a bipolar manic-depressive hippie with a BA in religion practicing primary-care pediatrics be up to? If the saving-the-world stuff doesn't work out, I have steady work and a decent income.”
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“P.3: The arts are not extracurricular.”
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“P.4-5: Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you're stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.”
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“P.6: If you don't have flights of ideas, why bother to think at all? I don't see how people without loose associations and flights of ideas get much done.”
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“P.7: Life for the unwell is discontinuous and unpredictable. Things just come out of nowhere. People try but mostly do a lousy job of taking care of you.”
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“P.16: The thing I've always loved about my troubled paternal grandmother — who I imagine as not yet troubled back then —was that when informed by her husband that they were broke she said, "Okay. Let's spend the summer in Europe."And they did.”
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“P.44: He was just a guy who couldn't blend in and had to keep making up different stories about it...Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it's easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion.”
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“P.45-46: It seemed odd that a psychiatrist working at Harvard in the sixties and seventies had a crew cut and looked like a Marine. His appearance was a testament to my open-mindedness. My Harvard crew-cut psychiatrist had said that my plans to set up a commune in British Columbia were just fine and, in fact, probably what he himself would be doing if he was my age. Now I was seeing him for permission to take a little less Thorazine. Our relationship had range.How are you sleeping? Eating? Any voices? Ideas of reference?""Not me, boss.""Let's go down to fifty milligrams three times a day."”
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“P.85: I had a serious sleeping problem and started taking Xanax for it and feeling much better. I associated not sleeping with going crazy. I didn't want to leave it up in the air whether or not I would sleep at night. Xanax seemed to make me the person I was meant to be and had no side effects. One miracle after another.”
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“P.96: Apparently what I had used to be called "soldier's heart" because so many soldiers complained of the same thing during World War I. I was a good soldier. Crushing chest pain and nausea were just part of being me.”
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“P.105: It wouldn't make sense for God to set up a universe where He had to keep track of every sparrow and step in and fix things with miracles. Better to have billions of sparrows and check in less often.”
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“P.112: My hospitalization was all black and gruesome punctuated by daily moments of peace and light when they gave me pathetic little fragments of Xanax around 5 p.m. For twenty minutes or so there would be hope in the world and colour and then it would fade and I'd wait for 5 p.m. the next day. Never trust a drug that's spelled the same backward and forward and has two x's in its name.”
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“P.122: Ockham's razor is useful when choosing between two theories that have the same predictions and the available data cannot distinguish between them. The razor directs us to go with the simplest of the theories. William of Ockham in the fourteenth century: "Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate," which translates as "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."”
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“P.124: With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you're zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all. So I was watching my thoughts in a detached way. I could zoom in or out to see how they looked without trying to change them. If I was lucky, I might find things that could be part of how I try to tell the truth.The first truth is that none of the thoughts going by are worth drinking over.”
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“P.125: When I could hear music again I noticed Coltrane, Monk, Professor Longhair, Billy Strayhorn, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Aaron Copland, and some others like I had never heard them before. They too seemed to be trying to tell the truth to save their own lives, and I was intensely grateful.”
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“P.131: Max insisted that I turn over all my cash and identification to him. He would keep it safe in a brown khaki bandolier money belt under his fresh blue paper scrubs. I would get to wear the money belt the second half of the week. I had forgotten how much fun it was to have a roommate.”
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“P.164: You have to wake up very early if you want to try to outthink me.”
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“P.166: There are no people anywhere who don't have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look. What is a myth is that we are mostly mentally well most of the time.”
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“P.192-193: My father gave me the gifts of being able to pay attention to my inner narration no matter how tedious the damn thing could be at times and the knowledge that creating something, be it music or a painting or a poem or a short story, was a way out of wherever you were and a way to find out what the hell happens next and not have it be just the same old thing. It's better to live in a world where you can write and paint and tell a few jokes than one where you can't.All the arts are ways to start a dialogue with yourself about what you've done, what you could have done differently, and whether or not you might try again. Whether or not you want to make a living or can make a living at it, people who consistently bother to try almost always get good or at least better.”
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Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you’re stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.
Highlighted by 60 Kindle customers -
With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you’re zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.
Highlighted by 42 Kindle customers -
Introverts almost never cause me trouble and are usually much better at what they do than extroverts. Extroverts are too busy slapping one another on the back, team building, and making fun of introverts to get much done. Extroverts are amazed and baffled by how much some introverts get done and assume that they, the extroverts, are somehow actually responsible.
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It’s possible within any given moment of any given day to choose between self and sickness. Rarely are there big heroic choices that will settle matters once and for all. The smallest positive step is probably the right one. Try not to argue. If you’re right, you don’t need to argue. If you’re wrong, it won’t help. If you’re okay, things will be okay. If you’re not okay, nothing else matters.
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Maybe I just had to learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, with being scared out of my mind, and to let it go past like it wasn’t about me.
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Part of what happens when one goes crazy is that there’s a grammatical shift. Thoughts come into the mind as firmly established truth. There is no simile or metaphor. There’s no tense but the present. The fantastic presents itself as fact.
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There are no people anywhere who don’t have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look. What is a myth is that we are mostly mentally well most of the time.
Highlighted by 32 Kindle customers -
An artist is someone who isn’t put off by how terrible his first tries are, who finds himself talking back and notices that he changes and grows when he makes art.
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If you take good care of any disease by eating well, sleeping well, being aware of your health, consciously wanting to be well, not smoking, et cetera, you are doing all the same things you should be doing anyway, but somehow having a disease makes them easier to do. A human without a disease is like a ship without a rudder.
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Beyond a certain point, gathering further evidence of the hurtfulness and shortcomings of one’s family, employer, et cetera is like eating the same poisonous mushroom over and over and expecting that sooner or later it will be nutritious. If recovery from mental illness depended on the goodness, mercy, and rational behavior of others, we’d all be screwed. Peace of mind is inversely proportional to expectations.
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Setting & Locations edit
Organizations edit
Authors & Contributors edit
- Mark Vonnegut (Author)
Classification edit
- Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
- Dewey: 920
Subjects edit
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