Rating: 
Summary: Gorgeous - Amazing - So Wonderfully Written
Review: "Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad" by Virginia Holman is an amazing memoir of mental illness, loneliness, and desperation. But, within such a dramatic framework is a tremendous tale of hope and discovery that you can't help but be uplifted and astonished by the sheer brilliance of Ms. Holman's talent.This true story is so engrossing that you will find that you have finished it (it's not a long book by any means) before you even realize it. This is truly rare and amazing book --- I loved it and would recommend it to everyone. What a wonderful treat! Well done Ms. Holman.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointed
Review: After reading the other customer reviews of this book, I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I found it did not live up to my expectations. It was a fairly quick read, but I did not find it so gripping as most of the other readers. I also felt that the descriptions of the author as having been "kidnapped" by her mother were not exactly accurate. How can you be kidnapped when your immediate family, including your father, know where you are? But this point aside, I felt there was not nearly enough depth in the author's analysis of how her mother's illness affected her as an adult. She spends a little time in therapy, doesn't feel it works for her, has a few conversations with her parents, writes a book, and that's about it. She marries the first serious boyfriend she has, and despite some concerns that she will inherit her mother's condition, she still has a child and seems to be fairly well-adjusted. I realize this is a work of fiction, so obviously I'm not asking her to create stories of bad teenage behavior, etc., but I feel the works of Jennifer Lauck and Mary Karr were far more gripping childhood memoirs. For example, the author makes several references to stealing items from friends and family, but never indicates how she was cured of this, or when she stopped, etc. I found the ending just a little too pat. Not a bad book, just not as good as I expected.
Rating:
Summary: Lovely and Amazing
Review: April 13, 2003 Sunday City Edition
SECTION: COMMENTARY; Pg. E-5
LENGTH: 854 words
HEADLINE: BETWEEN THE BOOKENDS
BYLINE: Ann Lloyd Merriman, Editor, Commentary/Books
BODY:
In the publishing cycle, spring usually brings a surge of books geared to the coming vacation season - lightweight, easy reading that can be used for escape or entertainment. Some call these books brain candy; most can be read without switching intellectual gears from neutral.
But a few titles rise above the flow to demand closer attention. One of them this spring comes from Virginia Holman, a native Virginian who has written a stark memoir about her childhood years with a schizophrenic mother in Rescuing Patty Hearst [Memoirs of a Decade Gone Mad] (Simon & Schuster, $23). Hers is a story familiar to many families with members suffering from intractable mental or physical ailments. In the case of Ms. Holman's mother Molly, the "compassionate" system set up in the 1960s to protect the rights of the mentally ill backfired. Although Molly made her family's life a living hell, caseworkers and other helpists insisted there was nothing they could do as long as she was not a danger to others or to herself. She succeeded in persuading them she was not - but, back with her family, she refused to take her prescribed medicines.
Ms. Holman was 8 when Molly first showed signs of the illness that eventually would institutionalize her. Convinced that she was a member of a secret army, Molly moved Virginia and her sister Emma from their Virginia Beach home to a Kechotan cottage. She turned the cottage into a small fortress. Her delusions and "voices" ruled her life and her family's lives; Virginia's father Nathan struggled to cope while working at a bank to provide for the family. Molly once thought the cottage was a field hospital and then planned to help the "war children." She led Virginia on a secret assignment far into the woods and left her. She took a butcher knife to Nathan and hit Virginia. Virginia picks at her memories to find a happy one, as if trying to coax a shred of meat from a crab claw, but mostly, she concludes, "Those years . . . were some of the blackest and most awful I can imagine a family enduring."
VIRGINIA'S MEMOIR, free of cloying self-pity, often is painful to read. Molly's family was caught in her web, unable to help her and unable to flee. Nathan tried; he always returned. Even after Virginia grew up and left home, her childhood experiences haunted her. She found some solace when she returned, with her husband and child, to the Kechotan cottage and then to Molly, by then permanently institutionalized, to seek understanding and perhaps the ability to forgive.
This is a powerful account of a family possessed, living in fear and dread - yet another testament to the failure of the mental-health system to rescue the afflicted. Molly had her rights, of course - so perhaps the system's defenders would consider her family's suffering merely "collateral damage." A better description comes from Virginia Holman, and it isn't pretty.
Rating:
Summary: enlightening view into a private world
Review: As painful as it was to read, I found this book very educational. It helped me understand the natural feelings associated with an adolescent coping with mental illness within the family. It also helped me understand the mental health system and how its good intentions are often detrimental to the families suffering from mental illness. I also just found the desciption of a geographically isolated coastal existence very touching. This is real life.
Rating:
Summary: Literature, not just an Oprah show
Review: CHILD OF THE TIMES
IF IT WERE ABOUT a conventional coming-of-age, Virginia Holman's memoir Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad (Simon & Schuster, $23) would be sensitive, poetical, evocative of the '70s epoch, and a first-rate rendering of a young life on the Virginia shore. Since it's about being raised by a clinically psychotic mother, the book is out of this world and halfway into another. "One year after Patty Hearst robbed Hibernia National Bank," Holman writes, "my mother lost her mind and kidnapped my sister and me to our family cottage in Kechotan, Virginia. Her reason was simple. My mother believed she had been inducted into a secret army. My mother, my baby sister, Emma, and I were foot soldiers entrusted with setting up a field hospital. We lived in that cottage for over three years."
If Ireland hurt Yeats into poetry, the Kechotan cottage hurt Holman into autobiography. Her mother Molly's attempt to impose the narrative of her delusion on her daughter compelled the 8-year-old Holman to find her footing in the narratives of literature: first Nancy Drew mysteries, later Virginia Woolf. The bare facts are scary: Molly slipped in and out of delusion in a time when only overt physical violence could get you committed. Whenever she did something actionable (like feeding her child Clorox instead of milk), she'd snap out of it in time to feed her a raw egg to make her vomit, then retell the tale as one of her rescuing the child by quick maternal thinking.
In the '70s, plenty of middle-class housewives were acting out like crazy, discovering themselves, doing odd things that didn't look so odd in the context of the upending of culture in general. Holman's book takes bitter note of the delusions of '70s social workers that her mother was sane; but mostly it just tells the incredible story of how she and her kid sister survived the madness of a parent and a decade.
Even before she became a writer, Holman showed imagination. When her mother painted the windows black, she took a nail and etched in the Pleiades from her mythology book: "Sometimes at night, bright moonlight would filter through and there the sisters would be, glowing on the cement floor." Holman casts a stark light on her mother's mind and her nightmare childhood, but it's an artfully patterned light. This is literature, not just an Oprah show.
Tim Appelo
Rating:
Summary: remarkable contribution
Review: I came across this book after hearing Holman speak at a Mental Health conference. Her talk and reading really brought to light the immense struggle of families who suffer with a severely mentally ill loved one. After the talk, people began standing up and telling their stories. I'm a scoail worker and I really didn't understand how many people struggle with ill loved ones
and how little help the legal and clinical system can provide to these families. It has certainly made me redouble my efforts
to listen, truly listen, and provide assistance to the family members I treat.
The book itself is truly remarkable. I have never read anything that really got to me the way this book did. Holman tells her story quietly and compellingly and without one iota of self-pity. Sometimes, she's pretty funny, too. I'm recommending it to all of my friends and colleagues.
Rating:
Summary: A brave, moving, and much needed memoir
Review: I found Virginia Holman's Rescuing Patty Hearst to be deeply moving. I too have a family member who suffers from mental illness and can relate to the isolation, the shame, and the struggle to find help from the community. Her depiction of a child raised by a schizophrenic mother is heartbreaking. Children often explore the boundary between fantasy and reality, and here, her mother's psychosis blurs those lines even further. Her mother's delusions become enmeshed into her everyday life. As the author grows into a young woman, she begins to sense the immensity of what is lost, and a different kind of struggle begins. How can her mother be helped when she denies needing it? How can her father, her sister and herself cope with the enormous loss and live fulfilling lives when their world is dominated by an illness that destroys the woman they love? Holman's brave memoir is a testament to the enduring human spirit and to the power of love. Through this book she offers a powerful gift to the world, giving valuable insight into the lives of families torn asunder by mental illness.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Look at Mental Illness
Review: I got this book as a Christmas present and devoured it!
This is the story of a young girl and her family as they
struggle against a vicious and untreated mental illness
in the mother. It is the most lovely and heartbreaking (not
to mention realistic) portrayal of what happens to families
with a chronically psychotic member that I have ever read.
It belongs on the top shelf of psychiatric-memoir classics with
Kay Jamison's Unquiet Mind and Kaysen's Girl Interrupted.
It is a haunting and moving account. I think this would make for
a phenomenal film. Perhaps with Julia Roberts with dark hair
as the amazing mother.
Rating:
Summary: Keep on truckin!
Review: I have been so tired of memoirs, but then I saw Rescuing Patty Hearst and had to pick it up. I grew up in the 70s, and had a pretty normal childhood, but I knew a family that reminded me of Holman's. As a child, we children just stayed away from the weird family, but now I begin to see what it must be like to live in such a strange household. Holman's book is hard, but funny as hell in places--reminds me of the Liar's Club and This Boy's Life, two of my favorite books. And the seventies came back to me in full force. Watergate, the music, the clothes. Wow, wow, wow. This book is just so right on. All I have to say is I can't wait for the next book. Keep on truckin!
Rating:
Summary: Terrific Book About Mental Illness
Review: I heard about this book on schizophrenia.com a website.
It is the most accurate account of what it is like to grow up with a parent with mental illness. Ignore the title that was given to the book, this is a story that is on par with childhood memoirs written by Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr, and Jacki Lyden. I've recommended it my book group--Rescuing Patty Hearst is a book that consumes all of your attention. A riveting account of a very scary illness.
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