The Parts of Him I Kept: The Gifts of My Father's Madness

by Natasha Williams

310 pages, Paperback

Published April 29, 2025

Reviews

[Nerfzilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, compelling and utterly heartbreaking, but also extremely funny sometimes. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to write. I knew going into the book that her father was schizophrenic, but I did not know how difficult her relationship with her mother was. Ms Williams is insightful and introspective but never engages in navel gazing or therapy talk. Her story moves quickly and somewhat breathlessly. She is honest to a fault. About herself as well as her family. She is always very interesting and easy to relate to but at times her circumstances made it difficult for me to keep reading. She never feels sorry for herself which made me feel much more sad but she made me love her father as much as she did, and I sobbed for long stretches. I know I will read this book again because it has so much to offer and I learned a lot from it, but also because I truly loved bed it. If you’re wavering, don’t. Buy it immediately and start reading. I finished it in two days and that’s only because I started reading late yesterday evening. Do yourself a favor and get this book. It’s wonderful.

[Emily Shearer · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you are as lucky as I am to know this gifted writer, you have to read this book with one hand over your heart, shaking your head as page after page you learn what her childhood was like and marvel at how she turned into such a warm-hearted woman and giving storyteller. The point of the book though, is not that she turned out that way despite her father's manias and messianic delusions, but because of them. Every vignette is told not as tragedy, not as rationalization or romanticization, but humanization. This is memoir as family tribute and as homage to the exercise of reflection of past to figure out present. All of us could benefit from such careful examination and such unconditional acceptance.