This memoir is Virginia Holman's stunning debut and winner of the Pushcart Prize in 2001. Virginia delves into the often painful, occasionally joyful, moments of her childhood with a schizophrenic mother. Through touching honesty and self-reflection, Virginia confronts memories of a life in which reality and fantasy gradually became difficult to separate.

When Molly McCloskey was a young girl, her brother Mike, 14 years her senior, started showing signs of paranoid schizophrenia. Through reading an astonishing archive of letters preserved by her mother and grandmother, and interviewing old friends of Mike's, she began to piece together a picture of his life.

"When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor seemed destined to become inseparable. The boys, both children of college professors, grew up on the same street in intellectually vibrant homes shaped by ideas, liberal Jewish culture, the trauma of the Holocaust, and a shared love of basketball and standup comedy. But the two best friends were also keen competitors bearing the same great expectations, and when Michael...