A young man is gripped by one fear: that he’ll lose his mind. In his family, mental illness has shaped lives for generations, and time in psychiatric wards has become almost a rite of passage. His battle to avoid inheriting his grandmother’s suicidal behavior, his mother’s bipolar disorder, or his father’s bouts with alcoholism and depression spurs him to flee Germany for New York, via Paris and Vienna, only to end up in just the kind of mental institution that so terrified him. But he works there as a psychologist rather than undergo treatment as a patient himself, and learns that a person is always more than a diagnosis. This picaresque novel, a potent blend of memoir and fiction, becomes a compassionate tale of reconciliation whereby the protagonist is forced to confront the question he has avoided all his life: What is normal?
Excerpt from Botany of Madness
In the end, there are seven boxes left. Stacked in a dark storage unit in Vienna, they hold the very things my mother had meant to throw away: old bills, tax returns, clutter.
I go through the boxes. One is overflowing with unopened mail. Letters from debt collectors and lawyers, enforcement orders and eviction notices. Their menace has long since faded. The postmarks date back seven years. I sit down on the floor and open the first envelope. The light goes off. I raise my arm. The light comes back on.
Among the official letters, I keep finding thank-you cards from Greenpeace and World Vision. My mother could no longer pay her rent, yet she kept donating money to build wells in Ethiopia and to save loggerhead turtles. Helping others mattered more to her than being helped herself, right to the end.
She called me three days before she was set to be evicted from her apartment. When she told me about this, she sounded detached, almost cheerful, as if it wasn’t happening to her, as if she had only read about it in the newspaper. Maybe not even that. There was no self-pity in her voice, no pity at all.
She explained what would happen next, as casually as if she were sharing an old family recipe for Silesian poppy seed dumplings with me. In a sense, being evicted was an old family recipe.
No one had suspected anything. After all, she’d had a six-figure sum in her account only a few years ago. Maybe she herself had been caught by surprise, as she hadn’t opened any of her mail for a year. Every morning she woke up in a panic, terrified. Alcohol was the only thing that got her through the day, and depression pinned her down.
I was living in Vienna at the time. I drove to Munich the day before the eviction. We went through the apartment together. I had a sense of detachment, too. We both did. We didn’t feel much anymore or speak much. In our family, there had always been this peculiar silence. Life was lived, not discussed.
I asked my mother if there was anything I should keep for her. Old photo albums? Her great-grandparents’ jewelry? Drawings by the kids? She shook her head. It would all go into storage. I am sitting in that storage unit now, shaking my head.
On the day of her eviction, a man was sitting in her kitchen. Tall, old, with sagging jowls that reminded me of a certain breed of dog. He introduced himself. My mother now had a legal guardian, but she treated him as if he were a mover who she herself had hired. It was time for a change of scenery anyway, she said coolly, making coffee in the kitchen that would soon no longer be hers.
She laughed. I’ll never forget that laugh. This made the guardian, a seasoned administrator of human suffering, seem all the more serious in contrast.
Other things I remember from that day: how awful her coffee tasted. Like sand and burnt rubber. I liked it anyway. My mother always drank her instant coffee far too strong. Even now, when I add just half a spoon too much to my cup and pour in the water, I’m back in her kitchen for a moment, back with her.
