Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad

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Summary: Voices of Truth and Love
Review: Unlike the frightening inner voices of her mother, Virginia Holman's literary voices speak with reality, honesty, and love.
Ms.Holman has captured the conflicted emotions of a daughter struggling with anger and embarrassment, even as she seeks to comprehend the mother's mental illness and offer a child's loyalty and concern. This book is a tribute to the resiliency of children,and to the human quest for answers to our most urgent queries.It's ironic that Ms. Holman's mother,in her deranged need to nurture and shelter fantasy children, was unable to provide the emotional support her real daughters craved. You will not soon forget the themes of this book, or the people whose experiences are recounted.

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Summary: Astonishing honesty! A must read!
Review: Virginia Holman's Rescuing Patty Hearst pulled me in from the very first pages. I couldn't put it down. The kids had to fix their own dinner, put themselves to bed, and I stayed up until a little past midnight to finish it. Hers is a story that is fascinating, painful, funny, and educational. She writes with great clarity and deftness and an honesty that is astonishing. I'm encouraging everyone in my family to read this book, and I think it should be on everyone's reading list, especially those with mentally ill family members or who work in the mental health profession.

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Summary: One Woman's Journey
Review: Virginia Holman's resonant language paints a poignant picture of a daughter's life with a delusional mother in the seventies, when it seemed as though the world, too, had gone a little crazy. This is a sad and touching memoir about grief, and one woman's journey to accept the reality of her mother's illness....interesting to compare this with a recent novel called Nature Lessons by Lynette Brasfield, another beautifully written book about a relationship between a paranoid mother and daughter. Holman and Brasfield's astonishingly candid books will stay in your mind for a long time.

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Summary: A Painful Memoir
Review: Virginia Holman's writing style is low-key and almost understated. Yet the effect is a hard punch in the gut to me as I absorb her description of living with her mother's schizophrenia. How someone can live through this, emerging sane and rational is an amazing triumph to celebrate. For years I've labelled my family as dysfunctional, though compared with Holman's, my childhood truamas pale into insignificance. She takes the reader as close to understanding what her life was like as is humanly possible, as close as anyone I've ever read. And still, I (nor anyone else) can't go all the way there. I can only imagine what it was like for her, be thankful she survived with sanity, grace, and dignity, and grateful she is willing to share her story with me and others.

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Summary: One of the Best Books about Schizophrenia
Review: We recently read Rescuing Patty Hearst in my book club and i have to say that it gave me so much insight and compassion for
family members who must cope with a mentally ill family member.
The years Holman describes seem to me a mix of the magic and
mayhem that ws the seventies as seen through the eyes of a child
watching her mother descend in to a state of irreversible insantity. It is a potent mixture and made me laugh and cry and
laugh again. Don't let the title fool you: this is a rare find
of a book. Not a whiny "oh my childhood was so hard book" but a
book about a family that tries to stay together in terrile circumstances, about a girl and family that grow up beautifully
and tackle their pain and grief and responsiblities as best they
can. This book generated so much conversation in our group. I learned about mental illness, about the obstacles to treatment
many families face, but most importantly, I learned what some families go through. And I definitely feel much more compassion for my friend who have depression and other illnesses. Virginia Holman's book really made me understand that mental illnesses
are brain diseases, physical diseases. I sort of knew that but never really felt it. This book got to me.
Pat Conroy calls it "One of the best books about schizophrenia I have ever read. Virginia Holman has delivered a gift to the
world of letters and the literature of mental illness." Nuff said.