Tells the heartrending story of a midcentury American family with 12 children, 6 of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Told entirely through the transcripts of the narrator’s psychiatric sessions, this intimate portrait of grief and longing follows 20-year-old Alicia Western as she, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, contemplates the nature of madness, her hallucinations and her own existence in 1972 Black River Falls, Wisconsin.

Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system...

The author escribes the circumstances of his mother’s death at the hands of his younger brother, a patient with uncontrolled schizophrenia, whose disease the author painstakingly researched throughout a devastating murder trial.

The daughter of piano prodigy Norma Herr describes how she and her sister were forced by their mother's violent schizophrenic episodes to discontinue contact with her until the author's debilitating injury changed her sense of the world and enabled a healing reconciliation.