Rescuing Patty Hearst : Growing Up Sane in a Decade Gone Mad

Rating:
Summary: Stunning, beautifully written
Review: I'm stunned by the impact this book had on me. Virginia Holman's beautifully written memoir is remarkable and gripping. The author's story traces the development of schizophrenia in her mother when the author was just a girl. I was fascinated and horrified how her mother's delusions began to play into the girl's own childhood fantasies. In one terrifying scene, you wonder whether the child herself has also slipped over the edge of reality. As she grows older, she has to confront the awful impact of her mother's disease on the family. While it is painful to witness the trials this family had to endure, there is also a warmth and love that bonds the family together. Ms. Holman's honest telling of her story is a tribute to her own strength and the strength of her family. This memoir is a valuable contribution to those who wish to understand the impact of mental disease on the family and should serve as a touchstone for those who have family members afflicted with mental illness.

Rating:
Summary: An Extraordinary Portrayal of Mental Illness
Review: In 1974, Virginia Holman was kidnapped. RESCUING PATTY HEARST is her ransom note.

The kidnapping was "custodial", which usually conjures up images of battery or abuse, or a divorce gone horribly wrong. The perpetrator here was not Holman's father or mother; instead, it was a disease. Holman's mother began experiencing delusions related to an undiagnosed case of schizophrenia. She came to believe that she was a soldier in a secret war and had to set up the family's vacation cottage on the Virginia coast as a field hospital to care for hordes of orphan children. But there were only two children in the small cottage --- Virginia and her baby sister --- and they were not being cared for.

Holman tells the story of her childhood experiences on two parallel tracks; each chapter has a date heading that explains whether a younger "Gingie" Holman, or her older, wiser contemporary counterpart is telling the story. We see what happens to Gingie, what she felt about it at the time, and how it affects her now. The author constantly evaluates and reevaluates her mother's actions and her own through the prism of time and experience, rotating back and forth in time to better understand what happened and why.

The book's subtitle is "Memories From A Decade Gone Mad"; its first line is "Nineteen seventy-four was a bad time to go crazy." Holman does not blame the excesses of the 1970's for her mother's illness, but makes the point that society was so topsy-turvy at that time that her mother's schizophrenia-induced actions seemed more normal than they otherwise might have. Holman's role model at that young age was Patricia Hearst, kidnapped heiress turned domestic terrorist. She is invoked as a symbol of the times, showing how stunning reversals in character and action can take place.

RESCUING PATTY HEARST is a beautifully realized portrait of a seventies childhood set against the backdrop of a devastating illness. Holman is blessed with both a powerful memory bank and astonishing skills at reviving the spirit of a lost civilization from the misty past. Some of this is unavoidably sentimental, but the areas of the book dealing with her mother's mental illness are starkly unsentimental. Holman's intimate knowledge of the disease is tinged with both sympathy and anger, leading to an honest, non-sensationalized portrayal of the reality of mental illness. Her memoir covers not only her mother's strange and powerful delusions, but also the day-to-day struggle that accompanies mental illness. Early on, Holman discusses an early delusion of her mother's that results in a stare of disgust from a harried salesman --- "a look," Holman writes, "that would become increasingly familiar in the years to come."

If Virginia Holman's mother had never experienced mental illness, there still would have been the makings of a memoir here; her portrayal of a childhood and a time is masterfully written and affecting. The presence of mental illness lends the book a wrenching quality, bringing home the reality of mental disability and the effects that it has on families and lives. Holman succeeds in describing her childhood; she triumphs in describing her mother, her illness and her plight. RESCUING PATTY HEARST is an extraordinary work, putting to shame more conventional or sentimental portrayals of mental illness.

--- Reviewed by Curtis Edmonds

Rating:
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.