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.

My most recent book is The World Against Her Skin, a fictional memoir (or as some would say, a work of reality fiction) that follows my mother's life closely, even as I have to imagine many of the details. Beck & Branch will publish this in May, 2022.

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

Reviews

[Kerin Groves · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Chess via Email · Rating 3 out of 5]

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