A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia

By Claire Phillips August 2020. Paperback.$18.95 | 9781733957908 $14.99 | 9781733957984 (ebook – available from all online retailers) Claire Phillips’ elegantly written and unflinching memoir about her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer diagnosed in mid-life with paranoid schizophrenia, challenges current conceptions about mental illness, relapse and recovery, as well as difficulties caring for an aging parent with a chronic disease. Told in fragments, the work also becomes a startling reflection on the evolution of feminism as seen through mother-daughter relationships. Only with her mother’s final relapse at age 73 did the author begin to tell this story, first in Black Clock magazine, an essay for which she received a Pushcart nomination and notable mention in The Best American Essays 2015. Claire Phillips and her mother, Joy Phillips PRAISE As heroic as it is original, Claire Phillips’ writing always finds the scary corners that would be secret to any other author, fro