Another Way Home: A Single Father's Story

by John Thorndike

Thorndike was a 24-year-old Peace Corps Volunteer in El Salvador when he met Clarisa, a vibrant and lovely Salvadoran girl, just 19. They fell in love, married, and in 1970 their son Janir was born. For the first year Clarisa was devoted to her baby and rarely left his side. But slowly she began a terrifying slide into schizophrenia, behaving in ways that endangered his son’s life.

Fearing for his safety, Thorndike made the wrenching decision to bring Janir back to the United States and raise him alone. Another Way Home is the account of their life together: their tender moments, their pitched battles, their heartbreaking reunions with Clarisa.

Genres: Memoir

245 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 1996

About the author

I grew up in Connecticut, read a thousand novels as a child and always wanted to write one. My mother was a reader, my father an editor and writer, and our house was filled with books. After four desperate years at a New England prep school I went to Harvard, wrote some fiction, studied night and day. Then a master's degree from Columbia, two years in the Peace Corps and a year of doctoral studies at NYU, brought to an end by marriage, parenthood and the delirious Sixties. In 1970 my wife and I moved to an isolated farm in Chile, where we lived for two years, raising chickens, growing potatoes and pursuing the complete back-to-the-land experience. When we divorced in 1974, I wound up with custody of our son and settled with him in Athens, Ohio, where I farmed for ten years, built houses for ten, and wrote.

My first two books were novels. Anna Delaney’s Child and The Potato Baron. My third book, Another Way Home, is a memoir about my wife’s schizophrenia and the years I spent raising my son. A second memoir, The Last of His Mind, recounts my father’s last year, in which dementia stripped him of memory, language and self-awareness.

My third novel was A Hundred Fires in Cuba, set in Havana during the early years of the Cuban Revolution.

I’ve written a pair of fictional memoirs (or as some would say, reality fiction) that follow my mother's life: The World Against Her Skin and The Passionate Sister. Recently I published a revised edition of The Last of His Mind, as Alzheimer’s remains such a piercing topic for so many.

You’ll find more about my books, and me, at johnthorndike.com

Reviews

[Kerin Groves]

Just study the cover photo; it says it all. This book has stuck with me and I reread it several times over the years. Thorndike has no easy answers, only honesty about his emotions and acceptance of what he cannot fix. Quite timeless. A must-read!

[Jodell]

This author marry's a woman from South America while in Peace Corps and they are happy, but she is in her early 20's and in the beginning of a mental illness that she nor he can quite understand. Schizophrenia usually begins in the early 20s of someone's life. And after John's wife has her baby, he realizes it's not safe to have his baby around her. So, John the author has to raise his child on his own. He sometimes got a little whinny about it because it is hard to have a one parent household and a crazy ex-wife who shows up out of nowhere all the time. But (just saying) more women than men raise their children and have jobs and no spouse and don't whine quite as much as he did. I grew up in a single parent household with a crazy parent and I grew up enough to be able to function in society and raise a family.

But Alan dose a good job of rasing his son in a wholesome environment and giving him a good life first in South America on a farm in the boonies, then in Athen's Ohio on an organic farm he was dedicated to growing organic crops. He later moves to Boulder Colorado and his son finishes of his high school years and goes to college. The boy had a good life.

My favorite quote of the book was this:

I had always assumed it would be a woman who would save me: who would hold and kiss me and give me the affection I hungered for. But women were not that interested in saving me. They had their own lives to worry about, and in the end, it turned out to be my son a child who's very conception I had resisted who taught me the most about love.

ps. I just wrote my review and looked on Goodreads for another of his books to read and come to find out this is the third novel of his ive read. And all of them were excellent. I loved his mother's story.

[Jay]

Solidly written. I devoured it in 3 days. That said, I was expecting a story about the stages of his wife slipping into schizophrenia and the subsequent impacts on
his marriage and their son. That is not what you get. Instead, you get a more surface level picture on his wife’s “odd behavior” before he leaves her and a story about a single dad post hippie era raising his son. I wanted more about exactly what was going on with his wife before he left her. And, I never really “saw” what I know to be “schizophrenia like” behavior from his wife. The word “schizophrenia” honestly could have been left out entirely and you, as the reader, wouldn’t have been like “wait a minute, she was clearly schizophrenic”.

[Chess via Email]

I can relate. Just kidding. Still swinging, single and unattached, ladies!

[Claudia]

One of my all-time favorites.