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The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia
Against the starkly beautiful backdrop of Anchorage, Alaska, where the author grew up, Marin Sardy weaves a fearless account of the shapeless thief—the schizophrenia—that kept her mother immersed in a world of private delusion and later manifested in her brother, ultimately claiming his life. Composed of exquisite, self-contained chapters that, cumulatively, take us through three generations of this adventurous, artistic, and often haunted family, The Edge of Every Day is an inquiry into our assumptions about how the mind can and should work—and a referendum on the treatment of the mentally ill in our society. As she explores the contours of cognition, Sardy also pushes the boundaries of her prose: one chapter is composed of quotes from family members talking about her mother. Another leads us through "loops" of past memory and current experience as she and her husband begin to merge their lives together.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published May 21, 2019
83 people are currently reading
3807 people want to read
About the author
Marin Sardy
3 books39 followersMarin Sardy is the author of the memoir The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia (Pantheon, May 2019). It is a wide-ranging, fragmentary exploration of the mental illness that runs in her family. Sardy's work has appeared in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Tin House, Guernica, the Rumpus, Fourth Genre, the Missouri Review, ARTnews, and Art Ltd., as well as in two award-winning photography books, Landscape Dreams and Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the former arts editor and editor-in-chief of Santa Fe's Santa Fean magazine, and has twice had her work listed among the years notable essays in Best American Essays. She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 107 reviews
October 5, 2019
Marin Sardy’s story brought me to my knees. At this book’s end I wished for a place where we could sit across from each other, holding hands, and together in the stillness letting our tears flow. She has written a spellbinding and profoundly moving book of memories. The words she shares about her brother are unforgettably portrayed with lucidity, compassion and so much love. You can feel her aching loss. This book, in my opinion, will influence the way we look at schizophrenia. A must read for anyone who has experienced the loss of a beloved sibling and still searches for answers to the question of what more could I have done? She’s left me with feelings of understanding, grace and hope.
August 8, 2019
Marin Sardy, essayist and award-winning writer of two photography books, pulls back from the maddening crowd to examine madness - in particular, schizophrenia as it has appeared in her family and affected the core of her existence. Raised by a mother who fell to the condition when Marin was ten - and categorically refused medication or treatment to address - she's had a front-row seat throughout the course of her life to the challenging nature of this illness. Were it not difficult enough to be parented by a woman afflicted with severe psychological delusions, the universe doubled down to present her with a brother cascading helplessly into the same nightmarish terrain.
The narrative is fractured, verging sharply from oblique observation to intense analysis to bewilderment, adjustment, and reflection on the symbols she used to process her pain. I was reminded very much of David Markson's work (Wittgenstein's Mistress, Reader's Block), and the power he could quite miraculously compact into a style of such loose cohesion. There's something very primitive going on here, and very brave, and very human.
"Yes, I know," I wanted to say sometimes. About the sense that no one but you was going to hang on to what was sensible, what was real. The conviction that any deviation into nonsense would lead to chaos, dissolution. The contempt, laced with terror, toward those who would be so cavalier with this thing called reality. As if reality were something you could simply cast off and live without. As if we don't absolutely need it, don't truly want it. As if that which is literal and measurable is not worth all our respect.
This is not the story of a journey. This is the story of a state of being. As such, it goes nowhere and encompasses an entire internal world.
And it is very, very good.
The narrative is fractured, verging sharply from oblique observation to intense analysis to bewilderment, adjustment, and reflection on the symbols she used to process her pain. I was reminded very much of David Markson's work (Wittgenstein's Mistress, Reader's Block), and the power he could quite miraculously compact into a style of such loose cohesion. There's something very primitive going on here, and very brave, and very human.
"Yes, I know," I wanted to say sometimes. About the sense that no one but you was going to hang on to what was sensible, what was real. The conviction that any deviation into nonsense would lead to chaos, dissolution. The contempt, laced with terror, toward those who would be so cavalier with this thing called reality. As if reality were something you could simply cast off and live without. As if we don't absolutely need it, don't truly want it. As if that which is literal and measurable is not worth all our respect.
This is not the story of a journey. This is the story of a state of being. As such, it goes nowhere and encompasses an entire internal world.
And it is very, very good.
March 12, 2019
A painful and beautiful account of what it means to live with and love someone suffering from mental illness, and how those relationships shape you and your understanding of the world. Required reading for anyone who knows someone with a mental illness, psychiatrists, psychology students, doctors, law enforcement officers, people working with the homeless, anyone looking to deepen their sense of empathy and understanding of others... so, everyone? Incredible book. Thanks for writing it, Marin.
February 18, 2019
A noted author of essays and criticism, Marin Sardy is the daughter and sister of schizophrenics, her mother and her brother Tom. Although her mother was never officially diagnosed, doctors suggested that she did have some form of schizophrenia, and, to Marin, her mother was stolen by this “shapeless thief”. The earlier parts of the book explore schizophrenia in a way that feels rather loosely connected, and indeed, portions of this book were previously published as essays: personal experiences, effects on families, a possible link to creativity, David Bowie and Ms. Sardy’s own wardrobe choices. However, as the book nears its central story, that of her brother Tom, its earlier disjointedness seems purposeful, a mimicking of the “episodic, fragmented, gaping” effect of schizophrenia itself. Life to a schizophrenic is described as “a series of stills”.
Tom’s story is heartbreaking, and that is neither trite nor a cliche, no. No other statement does justice. Robbed of all hope and promise, homeless on the streets of Anchorage, in and out of our inadequate mental health care systems, loved helplessly by family and friends who shelter him when possible and search endlessly for resources, solutions, help of any kind. Ultimately, Ms. Sardy relates a personal experience with a baby raven as a way to tell us that “…sometimes, ceremony is the only resolution we can have.” A deeply moving and thought-provoking reading experience. Available in May wherever books are sold.
Full Disclosure: A review copy of this book was provided to me by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group / Pantheon via NetGalley. I would like to thank the publisher and the author for providing me this opportunity. All opinions expressed herein are my own.
Tom’s story is heartbreaking, and that is neither trite nor a cliche, no. No other statement does justice. Robbed of all hope and promise, homeless on the streets of Anchorage, in and out of our inadequate mental health care systems, loved helplessly by family and friends who shelter him when possible and search endlessly for resources, solutions, help of any kind. Ultimately, Ms. Sardy relates a personal experience with a baby raven as a way to tell us that “…sometimes, ceremony is the only resolution we can have.” A deeply moving and thought-provoking reading experience. Available in May wherever books are sold.
Full Disclosure: A review copy of this book was provided to me by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group / Pantheon via NetGalley. I would like to thank the publisher and the author for providing me this opportunity. All opinions expressed herein are my own.
January 13, 2020
I really did not particularly like this book, the author’s voice, her observations and weirdly drawn conclusions from them, her pointless and useless information, the irrelevant information on her own life that didn’t fit into the main scheme. What even was the conclusion to this book? I don’t know. Quite a let down and glad to be done reading it. I do understand that she had gone through a lot and I so am not unsympathetic to her and her family. I did get a little more insight on schizophrenia which was my goal for this read. However, as a simple minded human, the oddness and format was a bit too much for me. Is was disorienting for sure
August 10, 2019
This book. It is so intricate, nuanced, intelligent, unflinching, by turns lyrical and raw, poetic and narrative, brainy and visceral. There's no secret about the book's climax, its most devastating event, but the construction and language held me spellbound and absolutely crushed yet consoled by the work's beauty. Most chapters are written as essays capable of standing alone, using many different styles and forms - combined with an occasional straight-ahead narrative chapter. Yet there is a unity of overall tone and linguistic control. It's the best nonfiction book I've read this year, and I doubt it will be beat. I'll be thinking about it for a long time.
March 2, 2025
i kept trying to think of words to describe how good this is, how well it puts into words the experience of having a loved one so severely ill, but every time i try, all i can think of is how much i miss them.
June 18, 2023
Sort of a memoir mostly of grief, sort of an arrangement of interesting observations and deep dives from the thoughtful mind of Marin Sardy.
Great section on David Bowie.
Her mom kept finches who just kept dying from the stress of the cats and the trips in the car and mom didn’t seem to realize.
The moose crash, and the calf that probably died after
Excerpts:
The thing about schizophrenia is once it happens, it just keeps happening.
His face is changing, has been changing. He smiles less than he used to when he was still lively and alert, which already seems so long ago. And when a smile is there, it’s indecipherable. His eyes look inward. His expression is often blank, that strange, disconcerting flatness I’ve seen on our mother’s face. … sometimes his whole body is stiff, his spine almost like a board when he sits. When he stands his arms hang straight down, palms inward and when he moves, his gestures are too plain, too simple, too lacking the inflection of personality.
Hallucinations and blank expressions are taking over. The Tom I know is receding into a distant, inner space. He doesn’t ask where I go during the day or at night. He doesn’t see the fear on my face, the sadness in my eyes.
Many of schizophrenia‘s underlying genes contribute to other disorders as well. And some aspects of the illness spectrum may be linked to intelligence and creativity. … IQ, creativity, depression, anxiety, addictions, mania, autism, ADHD.
Blend of nature and nurture: genetic susceptibility combined with environmental influences to begin shaping the brain just as it forms in the womb…
Chemical or physical or social., May occur throughout life: infections in utero, childhood trauma, cannabis use, etc.… We can’t predict who will get stuck or why, and for reasons unknown to science, there is a trend in multiplex families to increasing severity of illness in every generation.
White noise, people say. Loud colors. Using color to describe audio or volume to stand in for brightness. Conflating sound, and vision. Identifying some truth about the way being heard IS being seen. The way articulating one’s thoughts makes one visible.
I talked about Tom only rarely. I didn’t know much about what was going on with him because I couldn’t stand to think about it, and yet on some level, it was all I thought about, a background noise that I couldn’t turn off. I did sometimes say “I think my brother has schizophrenia” to close friends, a few friends, but no one grasped what the illness was or what it meant to my family and I didn’t have it in me to explain.
Tom didn’t do much more each day than live inside his own head.
Mental illness can be very seductive. These were choices made at a confluence of circumstance and biology, pride and shame, fortitude and fear. “ don’t you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?” sang David Bowie. Standing back from perception, finding the seams in its illusory seamlessness, questioning things usually taken for granted, it requires a breakdown of sorts, a disruption of the brain’s efficient systems, of its usual tracks of sensation and thought long enough to see beyond them.
We’re never in direct contact with reality. And someways of being wrong are useful, while others are not. And it’s mental illness only when the wrongness makes it harder to survive rather than easier.
… The odd half loss of my mother to mental illness. Sometimes it seem personal whole soul had collapsed, but the person we knew had been replaced by a stranger, yet the stranger knew our mother, had KNOW. Our mother, the stranger vaguely acknowledged her, sometimes seemed quite like her, maybe occasionally WAS her.
Outside, life continued as usual. Others rarely spoke of her or to her and when they did, they usually behaved as if she was just fine.
I barely spoke about my mother and I was beginning to see that ever larger chunks of my life were falling into the void of that non-telling.
Whatever mechanism enabled me to forget a moment so easily required that I not really be present as the moment was happening. This had become have it, my usual mode of facing anything uncomfortable or sad. Shut down, do not absorb. Habitual now was the muffled safety of non-presence.
Absence is not simple. Not simply a void. It is a space packed full.
… I may have found the real purpose of my selective amnesia: perhaps the true value lays in its power to simplify… something always lingers of what is destroyed. And in that long aftermath, faced with all that has not disappeared, we are forced to confront the persistent presence of what remains.
Experience can be defined as a reflective process of interpretation and assimilation of our encounters through time.
Breakthrough resistance by trying to be supportive and allay fears. Experts counsel to avoid sounding threatening and focus on concern for the sufferer’s safety, and keep the discussion among people he trusts, and feels close to. it requires partnering with him as well as influencing him without being controlling or intolerant.
But he was stiff and laconic. His face Nearly empty of emotion. And he held his body very Square, facing forward from the couch, resting his hands, lightly on knees. His whole way of being felt repetitive, Simplified, restricted, somehow a quality captured, surprisingly well in the psychiatric terms I discovered that describe it: Stereotyped gestures, flattened affect, impoverished speech.
Whenever you meet resistance in your efforts to convince a person to accept care, experts, advise try to work around a rigid beliefs, rather than trying to dismantle them. Don’t argue with delusions and don’t focus on points of contention. Find common ground, any common ground. Listen respectfully and empathize. Focus on goals you can agree on.
When convincing fails, greater pressure is sometimes recommended. In families this usually takes the form of firmly establishing conditions and putting forth hard choices between treatment and negative consequences. It is, in the language of addiction, about not being an enabler while also not being overly punitive.
Dad‘s letter: I want you to try and remember how much I love you and care for you. it is obvious now that you have a problem you are unwilling to accept. By allowing you to live here, I am enabling you to avoid making the decisions that you must make. My heart aches to help you.
Who knows how the charm bracelet she gave me when I was four, to which we added a charm every birthday until I was 10, has stayed with me? I don’t remember what kept it safe and close through all these years. I hardly noticed it until it occurred to me that it was perfect spellcasting material and I was struck by the use of the word charm. A charm bracelet, a kind of spell a string of talismans for love, success, protection. in some sense, I suppose that’s what my mother meant to be.
My mother has always been a keeper of small boxes, and an appreciator of Things miniature. In my childhood, she had them around on side tables, piano, tops, window ledges, wherever. I never consciously imitated her, but as I grew up, I found that I had my own small collection of boxes too and I needed them because I had things to put in them,… For years I accumulated small objects, things that I found I could never let go when I cleaned out my car or packed up my room to move again….
I knew I’d never be back on the Yukon Delta… I’d never again see my first boyfriend who gave me my first heart shaped rock picked up from a beach in Chile but more than that, what gave my objects our power was that i was once a teenage girl who could find no words for her own life, who had been unable to speak of her family’s suffering, that I was once a woman in her 20s who watched her brother fall, as her mother had, to schizophrenia. There is always something that comes before words, before I find the words, and it is in that place that my stones and trinkets and broken pieces have meant everything. I’ve had them when words failed me, betrayed me, escaped me, misconstrued me, or erased me. I created my own language from these objects , each one a slippery signifier with meanings and resonances only I knew. And when I made an altar, I could build a web of meanings around things to inchoate or painful or frightening to speak. This was the edge of language and I used it when I found myself at the edge of my world, carried there by schizophrenia. These objects anchored me to my life when I forgot again that I was real, that anything was real, when the scaffold of the world collapsed, leaving only madness and more madness. These were the objects I shored against my ruin.
The whole story of Tom’s schizophrenia has been a series of demands: all the coping his psychosis required of him, all the compliance the system required of him, all the independence we had required of him, and all the consequences he suffered, when he failed or refused. Perhaps, in choosing death, he made his debts his own.
This was, it struck me, simply how people died of schizophrenia. It happens by way of suicide or violence, or accident, via medication or self neglect, or exposure or some combination of many such things. It happens with the help of stigma, and isolation, and family dynamics, and a horribly flawed system of care. it happens indirectly, slowly or suddenly, often after a long, long slide.
Once I had made those drawings, I didn’t wonder about him anymore. Maybe the looking for him was the real point, or maybe my curiosity simply burned itself out. but it was also as if my act of looking had actually placed him there. I suspect that absence is only ever complete in the literal sense, as received fact. What we make of it, and make with it and make it into, all of which is real enough, has a way of undoing it. Absence becomes a presence. Not nothing but something. Almost material.
My friend the therapist once told me there was nothing you could’ve said or done that would’ve changed anything I know she meant it but I still don’t know if I think that it is true and I would like another chance to find out
There are things we wish to say to the dead. I have a list to tell Tom about happiness. I have wished to say that it is not what I once thought it was. it is lived, paradoxically, in life’s interstices, the small gaps that I didn’t think meant anything until they accrued. That I could not see it clearly, except in retrospect, as a composite formed over time. that it has to do with driving home after school in dad’s Wagoneer with the front bench seat that fit three across, me at the wheel, the radio playing, Tom beside me, Adrian in a bad mood. And I couldn’t tell you what we said, or recall any moments especially, but such moments are what my happiness was made of. They formed the fabric of it and the fabric felt strong, and for a long time it was the thing that held me up. And that is how I remember Tom. And it is what I have wanted to say to him about happiness. That there’s no trick to it. That it’s waiting at the edge of everyday, hoping to be noticed.
I’m trying to tell you that we all have the power to claim things. I’m trying to tell you that his record still stands, that it will stand for the next thousand years.
Great section on David Bowie.
Her mom kept finches who just kept dying from the stress of the cats and the trips in the car and mom didn’t seem to realize.
The moose crash, and the calf that probably died after
Excerpts:
The thing about schizophrenia is once it happens, it just keeps happening.
His face is changing, has been changing. He smiles less than he used to when he was still lively and alert, which already seems so long ago. And when a smile is there, it’s indecipherable. His eyes look inward. His expression is often blank, that strange, disconcerting flatness I’ve seen on our mother’s face. … sometimes his whole body is stiff, his spine almost like a board when he sits. When he stands his arms hang straight down, palms inward and when he moves, his gestures are too plain, too simple, too lacking the inflection of personality.
Hallucinations and blank expressions are taking over. The Tom I know is receding into a distant, inner space. He doesn’t ask where I go during the day or at night. He doesn’t see the fear on my face, the sadness in my eyes.
Many of schizophrenia‘s underlying genes contribute to other disorders as well. And some aspects of the illness spectrum may be linked to intelligence and creativity. … IQ, creativity, depression, anxiety, addictions, mania, autism, ADHD.
Blend of nature and nurture: genetic susceptibility combined with environmental influences to begin shaping the brain just as it forms in the womb…
Chemical or physical or social., May occur throughout life: infections in utero, childhood trauma, cannabis use, etc.… We can’t predict who will get stuck or why, and for reasons unknown to science, there is a trend in multiplex families to increasing severity of illness in every generation.
White noise, people say. Loud colors. Using color to describe audio or volume to stand in for brightness. Conflating sound, and vision. Identifying some truth about the way being heard IS being seen. The way articulating one’s thoughts makes one visible.
I talked about Tom only rarely. I didn’t know much about what was going on with him because I couldn’t stand to think about it, and yet on some level, it was all I thought about, a background noise that I couldn’t turn off. I did sometimes say “I think my brother has schizophrenia” to close friends, a few friends, but no one grasped what the illness was or what it meant to my family and I didn’t have it in me to explain.
Tom didn’t do much more each day than live inside his own head.
Mental illness can be very seductive. These were choices made at a confluence of circumstance and biology, pride and shame, fortitude and fear. “ don’t you wonder sometimes about sound and vision?” sang David Bowie. Standing back from perception, finding the seams in its illusory seamlessness, questioning things usually taken for granted, it requires a breakdown of sorts, a disruption of the brain’s efficient systems, of its usual tracks of sensation and thought long enough to see beyond them.
We’re never in direct contact with reality. And someways of being wrong are useful, while others are not. And it’s mental illness only when the wrongness makes it harder to survive rather than easier.
… The odd half loss of my mother to mental illness. Sometimes it seem personal whole soul had collapsed, but the person we knew had been replaced by a stranger, yet the stranger knew our mother, had KNOW. Our mother, the stranger vaguely acknowledged her, sometimes seemed quite like her, maybe occasionally WAS her.
Outside, life continued as usual. Others rarely spoke of her or to her and when they did, they usually behaved as if she was just fine.
I barely spoke about my mother and I was beginning to see that ever larger chunks of my life were falling into the void of that non-telling.
Whatever mechanism enabled me to forget a moment so easily required that I not really be present as the moment was happening. This had become have it, my usual mode of facing anything uncomfortable or sad. Shut down, do not absorb. Habitual now was the muffled safety of non-presence.
Absence is not simple. Not simply a void. It is a space packed full.
… I may have found the real purpose of my selective amnesia: perhaps the true value lays in its power to simplify… something always lingers of what is destroyed. And in that long aftermath, faced with all that has not disappeared, we are forced to confront the persistent presence of what remains.
Experience can be defined as a reflective process of interpretation and assimilation of our encounters through time.
Breakthrough resistance by trying to be supportive and allay fears. Experts counsel to avoid sounding threatening and focus on concern for the sufferer’s safety, and keep the discussion among people he trusts, and feels close to. it requires partnering with him as well as influencing him without being controlling or intolerant.
But he was stiff and laconic. His face Nearly empty of emotion. And he held his body very Square, facing forward from the couch, resting his hands, lightly on knees. His whole way of being felt repetitive, Simplified, restricted, somehow a quality captured, surprisingly well in the psychiatric terms I discovered that describe it: Stereotyped gestures, flattened affect, impoverished speech.
Whenever you meet resistance in your efforts to convince a person to accept care, experts, advise try to work around a rigid beliefs, rather than trying to dismantle them. Don’t argue with delusions and don’t focus on points of contention. Find common ground, any common ground. Listen respectfully and empathize. Focus on goals you can agree on.
When convincing fails, greater pressure is sometimes recommended. In families this usually takes the form of firmly establishing conditions and putting forth hard choices between treatment and negative consequences. It is, in the language of addiction, about not being an enabler while also not being overly punitive.
Dad‘s letter: I want you to try and remember how much I love you and care for you. it is obvious now that you have a problem you are unwilling to accept. By allowing you to live here, I am enabling you to avoid making the decisions that you must make. My heart aches to help you.
Who knows how the charm bracelet she gave me when I was four, to which we added a charm every birthday until I was 10, has stayed with me? I don’t remember what kept it safe and close through all these years. I hardly noticed it until it occurred to me that it was perfect spellcasting material and I was struck by the use of the word charm. A charm bracelet, a kind of spell a string of talismans for love, success, protection. in some sense, I suppose that’s what my mother meant to be.
My mother has always been a keeper of small boxes, and an appreciator of Things miniature. In my childhood, she had them around on side tables, piano, tops, window ledges, wherever. I never consciously imitated her, but as I grew up, I found that I had my own small collection of boxes too and I needed them because I had things to put in them,… For years I accumulated small objects, things that I found I could never let go when I cleaned out my car or packed up my room to move again….
I knew I’d never be back on the Yukon Delta… I’d never again see my first boyfriend who gave me my first heart shaped rock picked up from a beach in Chile but more than that, what gave my objects our power was that i was once a teenage girl who could find no words for her own life, who had been unable to speak of her family’s suffering, that I was once a woman in her 20s who watched her brother fall, as her mother had, to schizophrenia. There is always something that comes before words, before I find the words, and it is in that place that my stones and trinkets and broken pieces have meant everything. I’ve had them when words failed me, betrayed me, escaped me, misconstrued me, or erased me. I created my own language from these objects , each one a slippery signifier with meanings and resonances only I knew. And when I made an altar, I could build a web of meanings around things to inchoate or painful or frightening to speak. This was the edge of language and I used it when I found myself at the edge of my world, carried there by schizophrenia. These objects anchored me to my life when I forgot again that I was real, that anything was real, when the scaffold of the world collapsed, leaving only madness and more madness. These were the objects I shored against my ruin.
The whole story of Tom’s schizophrenia has been a series of demands: all the coping his psychosis required of him, all the compliance the system required of him, all the independence we had required of him, and all the consequences he suffered, when he failed or refused. Perhaps, in choosing death, he made his debts his own.
This was, it struck me, simply how people died of schizophrenia. It happens by way of suicide or violence, or accident, via medication or self neglect, or exposure or some combination of many such things. It happens with the help of stigma, and isolation, and family dynamics, and a horribly flawed system of care. it happens indirectly, slowly or suddenly, often after a long, long slide.
Once I had made those drawings, I didn’t wonder about him anymore. Maybe the looking for him was the real point, or maybe my curiosity simply burned itself out. but it was also as if my act of looking had actually placed him there. I suspect that absence is only ever complete in the literal sense, as received fact. What we make of it, and make with it and make it into, all of which is real enough, has a way of undoing it. Absence becomes a presence. Not nothing but something. Almost material.
My friend the therapist once told me there was nothing you could’ve said or done that would’ve changed anything I know she meant it but I still don’t know if I think that it is true and I would like another chance to find out
There are things we wish to say to the dead. I have a list to tell Tom about happiness. I have wished to say that it is not what I once thought it was. it is lived, paradoxically, in life’s interstices, the small gaps that I didn’t think meant anything until they accrued. That I could not see it clearly, except in retrospect, as a composite formed over time. that it has to do with driving home after school in dad’s Wagoneer with the front bench seat that fit three across, me at the wheel, the radio playing, Tom beside me, Adrian in a bad mood. And I couldn’t tell you what we said, or recall any moments especially, but such moments are what my happiness was made of. They formed the fabric of it and the fabric felt strong, and for a long time it was the thing that held me up. And that is how I remember Tom. And it is what I have wanted to say to him about happiness. That there’s no trick to it. That it’s waiting at the edge of everyday, hoping to be noticed.
I’m trying to tell you that we all have the power to claim things. I’m trying to tell you that his record still stands, that it will stand for the next thousand years.
November 13, 2020
A fractured and devastating series of essays that circle obsessively around Sardy's mother and brother, who both suffer from a primary psychotic illness. I thought the second half of the book--focused heavily on her brother--was most compelling and should be required reading for mental health providers. I found myself wondering how Sardy's mother received the suicide of her son and the creation of this narrative. Looking forward to sharing this book with other psychiatrists and reading more of Sardy's future work.
September 9, 2019
Interesting at times, but ultimately couldn't hold my attention with the challenging format that switches between vignettes so quickly. I can see what the author was doing, making the piece disjointed like a schizophenic mind. I got about 4/5 through this and quit, flipped ahead to the end and called it a day.
May 28, 2023
A collection of memories, research, thoughts, and emotions in disjointed yet thoughtful chapters. I appreciated how this book was the point of view of someone who, though not directly suffering from a mental illness, was very much affected by it. The author brings a sense of importance and urgency to the topic just by telling her story. I thought it was going to be about her mother, but ended up being more about the author’s relationship with her brother. Anyone who loves someone who struggles with mental health will resonate with some part of this book.
March 28, 2021
This book is a collection of essays about the author's experiences growing up with a mother with schizophrenia and the helplessness she felt as her brother developed schizophrenia, became homeless, and eventually died of suicide. I thought they were well written and painfully relatable. Some essays resonated with me more than others, but all of them contained passages that made me pause and reflect. I highly recommend this book to anyone whose life has been shaped by severe mental illness.
January 15, 2025
⭐️3.4
I usually give autobiographies higher rankings but Sardy really lost me at points.
That being said, it was a much needed read. Having the perspective of someone who has been through what I am currently going through with my brother was both insightful and eerily familiar.
“Tom’s schizophrenia didn’t occur in a vacuum. It occurred within our family”
I usually give autobiographies higher rankings but Sardy really lost me at points.
That being said, it was a much needed read. Having the perspective of someone who has been through what I am currently going through with my brother was both insightful and eerily familiar.
“Tom’s schizophrenia didn’t occur in a vacuum. It occurred within our family”
January 20, 2025
“Where does a mind go, when it is lost?”
This is a heartbreaking account of the author as she learns to maneuver through life and love while having two family members afflicted by the often misunderstood, and painfully rendered claws of schizophrenia. Through the baffling and inexplicable ways it has manifested in her mother’s sudden journeys and paranoid runaways to the more visceral and harrowing way it destroys her brother, Sardy is able to capture both the overwhelming darkness as well as the still-present light within the disease. I think more than chronicling the disease as it stripped away what she knew of her loved ones though, she also makes such a good case about the fluctuating nature of our agreed-upon ideas of normalcy, memory, reason, and so on, and how such diseases only fall short of that threshold by just an inch or so. But this falling off the edge ends up with them inhabiting an entirely separate and unfathomable void that is hard to reach, no matter how hard one tries.
“The point being that we’re never in direct contact with reality. And also that some ways of being wrong are useful, while others are not. It is mental illness only when the wrongness makes it harder to survive rather than easier.”
The author makes it a point to show us how you did not have to move all that far away from reality in itself to chance upon the wondrous or the mad. Reality is a careful conglomeration of fascinating and astonishing things that have been integrated into our normal psyche, made normal merely by consensus. She illustrates this by telling us how the word ‘red’ conjures up a very specific shade in our heads, and maybe some connected images and words, while in “reality”, it is merely a particular wavelength of light as it scatters through particles in the air and reaches our eyes. It is red only because we say it is, an accepted boundary that we draw within a world. Thus she takes it as a comfort to think that those who struggle with reality, like schizophrenics, only push these accepted boundaries a little further than we like, and that is where the psyche loses its grip. It is not as devious or decisive as one would make you believe, just a simple calculation error up there, and an error that is not useful to one’s understanding of the world. Reality is itself a fickle and fluctuating thing, and we who place ourselves so firmly in the land of the rationale, and the reasonable, often forget this fragile nature of things.
Narrativization is another key concept Sardy realizes is integral to one’s perception of their reality, especially the need for narrativizing to lead an actually fulfilling life. You need to be able to tell yourself a story to convince yourself that this present moment matters and means something, and that it is leading to an equally meaningful and definite future, and that the days that you have lived through has brought about this current moment. The ability to arrange one’s life into a cohesive order, to be able to both look back and look forward and realize both the past and the present as separate but connected entities is essential to this process of making sense of oneself. That is one of the main things that schizophrenia robs from its victims, the ability to set a timeline for yourself and place your life into a logical rational order. What do you do when you cannot even string together a timeline of your existence? Do you disappear entirely? Or are you ever-present but devoid of explanations?
I think it is in Sardy’s way of not simply lending kindness to the her portrayals of the disease but her ability to formulate an equal rationale for their actions and thoughts that makes this book so affecting. Rendered in the way that the author does it, the things the diseased says or does do not seem so awful after all, and only appear to us as the desperate attempts at connection and sense-making that they are. A point that particularly shows this is when she describes her mother’s endless ramblings as a “fight for the validity of her thoughts”, a fight that is as natural to us as any. To inhabit a world so incomprehensible, so separate, so removed, and so alone that your version of reality can never be translated to the person in front of you - is there a bigger tragedy? And not being able to trust your mind, the machinations going on up in your head, your brain not being able to trust itself - the book does such a great job of conveying the sheer terror of that.
It also captures the helplessness of those surrounding the victim perfectly. The pain of having to watch someone suffer through something they cannot even express, and that if it was even able to be expressed could not be hoped to be fully comprehended. How do you protect someone from something you don’t even fully understand? The inarticulate, the misunderstood, the incomprehensible - how do you fathom the danger this presents and how do you set about protecting someone from the unfathomable? A further layer to this that the author explores is that it is not just the fear of what the disease would do to them that they had to grapple with, but of what the world could do to them, and more hurtfully of what they are capable of inflecting back upon the world. As when the narrator’s brother Tom, in the throes of the illness, was homeless for years on end and lived a dangerous life, seeming to society as no more than a threat, and she had to acknowledge that he is capable of danger as well. The fear was additionally also about how he would be perceived, and how that perception could reasonably be so separate from the loving little brother the narrator knew and loved.
There were also these specifically gut-wrenching sections which show some struggles we would not even have thought of that show just how different and especially harrowing the lived experience of such an illness can be. Like when the family draws boundaries for the benefit of the victim, but they are unable to logically understand the causes and consequences of what has happened. What they comprehend instead is that they have been barred or rejected and so they draw lines for themselves, but because of their inability to understand why, they end up over-drawing these lines to be on the safe side, thus restricting and alienating them further. In another instance, meeting him after a long hiatus of not being able to, she describes the stunted and stuck interaction they had where she felt like she was getting nowhere. Yet, she then understands that he was in fact giving her everything he had in him. He had years worth of love to express and an equal amount of madness to suppress and keep down - she thus realizes that he was doing the best he can.
The narrator also talks up about all the elements she finds solace in - whether it be nature or science or creating highly specific altars to concretize the storms swirling inside her or these words through which she makes sense of all that has happened. Her insistence on science especially, not in the sense of a need of an explanation but in the way it functions as a vehicle to allow for an exploration of the awe-inspiring incredible parts of the world. On being accused of over-intellectualizing their brother’s mental illness by her sister, she explains how it felt to her like “science could be a way of loving something more deeply”. How to her an attempt at understanding and feeling what it was like to be him through science , even if she could never achieve it fully, was as close to love as she could get for him.
All in all, this was so so well done. It is not my place to tell someone who has been through something how much justice they were able to give to that experience, but this book was clearly a much needed and much accomplished book in that sense. If not closure, then there was an assessment and understanding here that stands testament to the love she clearly has and had for both her mother and brother. She was able to weave in so much, and so much of what I enjoy in my books too - whether that be memory or the past or how we craft stories and the fallible nature of reality and so on. To realize all these themes so well on one side and to then incorporate an equally thorough exploration of one of the most complex mental disorders - it is truly such a feat. This is a tough read for sure, but the love and light that keeps it buoyed up is such a salve through it. Highly highly recommend. My first five star of the year.
This is a heartbreaking account of the author as she learns to maneuver through life and love while having two family members afflicted by the often misunderstood, and painfully rendered claws of schizophrenia. Through the baffling and inexplicable ways it has manifested in her mother’s sudden journeys and paranoid runaways to the more visceral and harrowing way it destroys her brother, Sardy is able to capture both the overwhelming darkness as well as the still-present light within the disease. I think more than chronicling the disease as it stripped away what she knew of her loved ones though, she also makes such a good case about the fluctuating nature of our agreed-upon ideas of normalcy, memory, reason, and so on, and how such diseases only fall short of that threshold by just an inch or so. But this falling off the edge ends up with them inhabiting an entirely separate and unfathomable void that is hard to reach, no matter how hard one tries.
“The point being that we’re never in direct contact with reality. And also that some ways of being wrong are useful, while others are not. It is mental illness only when the wrongness makes it harder to survive rather than easier.”
The author makes it a point to show us how you did not have to move all that far away from reality in itself to chance upon the wondrous or the mad. Reality is a careful conglomeration of fascinating and astonishing things that have been integrated into our normal psyche, made normal merely by consensus. She illustrates this by telling us how the word ‘red’ conjures up a very specific shade in our heads, and maybe some connected images and words, while in “reality”, it is merely a particular wavelength of light as it scatters through particles in the air and reaches our eyes. It is red only because we say it is, an accepted boundary that we draw within a world. Thus she takes it as a comfort to think that those who struggle with reality, like schizophrenics, only push these accepted boundaries a little further than we like, and that is where the psyche loses its grip. It is not as devious or decisive as one would make you believe, just a simple calculation error up there, and an error that is not useful to one’s understanding of the world. Reality is itself a fickle and fluctuating thing, and we who place ourselves so firmly in the land of the rationale, and the reasonable, often forget this fragile nature of things.
Narrativization is another key concept Sardy realizes is integral to one’s perception of their reality, especially the need for narrativizing to lead an actually fulfilling life. You need to be able to tell yourself a story to convince yourself that this present moment matters and means something, and that it is leading to an equally meaningful and definite future, and that the days that you have lived through has brought about this current moment. The ability to arrange one’s life into a cohesive order, to be able to both look back and look forward and realize both the past and the present as separate but connected entities is essential to this process of making sense of oneself. That is one of the main things that schizophrenia robs from its victims, the ability to set a timeline for yourself and place your life into a logical rational order. What do you do when you cannot even string together a timeline of your existence? Do you disappear entirely? Or are you ever-present but devoid of explanations?
I think it is in Sardy’s way of not simply lending kindness to the her portrayals of the disease but her ability to formulate an equal rationale for their actions and thoughts that makes this book so affecting. Rendered in the way that the author does it, the things the diseased says or does do not seem so awful after all, and only appear to us as the desperate attempts at connection and sense-making that they are. A point that particularly shows this is when she describes her mother’s endless ramblings as a “fight for the validity of her thoughts”, a fight that is as natural to us as any. To inhabit a world so incomprehensible, so separate, so removed, and so alone that your version of reality can never be translated to the person in front of you - is there a bigger tragedy? And not being able to trust your mind, the machinations going on up in your head, your brain not being able to trust itself - the book does such a great job of conveying the sheer terror of that.
It also captures the helplessness of those surrounding the victim perfectly. The pain of having to watch someone suffer through something they cannot even express, and that if it was even able to be expressed could not be hoped to be fully comprehended. How do you protect someone from something you don’t even fully understand? The inarticulate, the misunderstood, the incomprehensible - how do you fathom the danger this presents and how do you set about protecting someone from the unfathomable? A further layer to this that the author explores is that it is not just the fear of what the disease would do to them that they had to grapple with, but of what the world could do to them, and more hurtfully of what they are capable of inflecting back upon the world. As when the narrator’s brother Tom, in the throes of the illness, was homeless for years on end and lived a dangerous life, seeming to society as no more than a threat, and she had to acknowledge that he is capable of danger as well. The fear was additionally also about how he would be perceived, and how that perception could reasonably be so separate from the loving little brother the narrator knew and loved.
There were also these specifically gut-wrenching sections which show some struggles we would not even have thought of that show just how different and especially harrowing the lived experience of such an illness can be. Like when the family draws boundaries for the benefit of the victim, but they are unable to logically understand the causes and consequences of what has happened. What they comprehend instead is that they have been barred or rejected and so they draw lines for themselves, but because of their inability to understand why, they end up over-drawing these lines to be on the safe side, thus restricting and alienating them further. In another instance, meeting him after a long hiatus of not being able to, she describes the stunted and stuck interaction they had where she felt like she was getting nowhere. Yet, she then understands that he was in fact giving her everything he had in him. He had years worth of love to express and an equal amount of madness to suppress and keep down - she thus realizes that he was doing the best he can.
The narrator also talks up about all the elements she finds solace in - whether it be nature or science or creating highly specific altars to concretize the storms swirling inside her or these words through which she makes sense of all that has happened. Her insistence on science especially, not in the sense of a need of an explanation but in the way it functions as a vehicle to allow for an exploration of the awe-inspiring incredible parts of the world. On being accused of over-intellectualizing their brother’s mental illness by her sister, she explains how it felt to her like “science could be a way of loving something more deeply”. How to her an attempt at understanding and feeling what it was like to be him through science , even if she could never achieve it fully, was as close to love as she could get for him.
All in all, this was so so well done. It is not my place to tell someone who has been through something how much justice they were able to give to that experience, but this book was clearly a much needed and much accomplished book in that sense. If not closure, then there was an assessment and understanding here that stands testament to the love she clearly has and had for both her mother and brother. She was able to weave in so much, and so much of what I enjoy in my books too - whether that be memory or the past or how we craft stories and the fallible nature of reality and so on. To realize all these themes so well on one side and to then incorporate an equally thorough exploration of one of the most complex mental disorders - it is truly such a feat. This is a tough read for sure, but the love and light that keeps it buoyed up is such a salve through it. Highly highly recommend. My first five star of the year.
April 14, 2024
DNF at 65%. Sardy's memoir centers around her experiences with her mother and her brother, who were both diagnosed with schizophrenia, and the pervasive mental illnesses that plague many members of her extended family. This was a rare DNF memoir for me -- I kept stopping, restarting, and stopping again as I got bored by the tangents about Sardy's own wardrobe choices, etc. Not a bad memoir, but not one I would recommend for people interested in learning about how schizophrenia and related disorders impact one's life and one's family.
Further reading -- books about schizophrenia and related disorders I would recommend:
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker
The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang
The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn Saks
Further reading -- books about schizophrenia and related disorders I would recommend:
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker
The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang
The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness by Elyn Saks
October 27, 2020
reading this was heart-wrenching especially about how her brother struggled w/ it and how her therapist friend who knew schizophrenia well told marin that "its a miracle your brother lived as long as he did". 🥺 but there were also parts where i tend to lose focus as the format makes it such a challenging read for me. 😫 when some are quite irrelevant, i did get a little brief of what schizophrenia is which was what i expected to read from this book. however, i wished there was just more closure on it & maybe a conclusion of the book?? 🤔 i was actually kinda lost of what the intention of the book is :")
anyways, what i really like about this book is that it shows how difficult it is to desperately want to help your loved ones but not being able to. at the same time, bringing in the awareness especially to people who is not familiar with schizophrenia. 🙇♀️
"this is the way schizophrenia tangles things. it ruptures life stories, riddles history with unknowables. but it also points to how we continue on. i suspect that the only real weapon we in my family have ever had against mental illness is how we choose to live. we fight back by refusing to let existence be sapped of its beauty and its mystery and its joy". 🌱
anyways, what i really like about this book is that it shows how difficult it is to desperately want to help your loved ones but not being able to. at the same time, bringing in the awareness especially to people who is not familiar with schizophrenia. 🙇♀️
"this is the way schizophrenia tangles things. it ruptures life stories, riddles history with unknowables. but it also points to how we continue on. i suspect that the only real weapon we in my family have ever had against mental illness is how we choose to live. we fight back by refusing to let existence be sapped of its beauty and its mystery and its joy". 🌱
November 28, 2019
Arty but uneven
Haunting and heart wrenching at times, bewildering and dull at others. There's a part about gymnastics that really stands out. Marin should write an entire book about it.
Haunting and heart wrenching at times, bewildering and dull at others. There's a part about gymnastics that really stands out. Marin should write an entire book about it.
March 27, 2020
i had trouble getting into this book at first—it’s written kind of oddly, and it’s really not what i expected. as i got to know marin, i became way more interested. i gave it five stars because when it’s good, it’s REALLY good.
August 20, 2019
A very hard book emotionally. A very good book intellectually. "Suicide as a complication of mental illness." Yes. So very, very much yes.
September 18, 2019
This book made me uncomfortable from beginning to end. That being said, I think more people should read and/or skim this content. It is harrowing yet it gives me greater understanding and empathy for the host of people who are affected by the debilitating effects of mental health issues. The writing is very fractured though and I still can't determine if that was intentional or accidental.
May 18, 2019
When just a young girl, Marin Sardy’s mother began exhibiting symptoms of schizophrenia, though she never admitted to a problem and therefore was never diagnosed or treated. She did however, keep foil on the end of the television antennas and was so fearful of assassins she barricaded the door at night and often took the children to sleep in a motel.
Her parents got divorced, and her father bought the house next door so they could easily share custody, but he never discussed his ex-wife’s mental health. At times, Marin thought she was the one who had a problem. No one else was talking about it, so maybe her mother was the sane one.
By the time her little brother Tom reached his twenties, the family still wasn’t talking about mental health, but they had to acknowledge that the “shapeless thief” that stole their mother had set his eyes on Tom as well.
In The Edge of Everyday, Sardy combines innovative slices of writing to explore the illness that stalked her family and how it affected her and her other family members, particularly her father. She also reaches into the past to see how tendrils of genetic code of previous generations might have influenced the present and so to the future.
The chapters or essays in the volume take on different forms. Some are list, such as strange things Sardy has encountered. Another is a list of responses of family members--siblings, aunts, her father, her grandmother--to her mother’s symptoms. So striking is the repetition of hopelessness and lack of understanding evident in the “I don’t know”s in their reflections. Another chapter is told in “loops” of time.
The writing is lovely and raw, showing how mental illness echoes in a family, a group of friends, and a community. Sardy also frequently calls attention to the inadequate institutions available for those suffering from mental health issues which keeps them from getting the individualized treatment they need.
Though the chapters cover diverse subjects, from Sardy’s teenage gymnastics career to her David Bowie-inspired wardrobe in her twenties and her relationship with wicca, the theme of walking the line between mental health and mental illness winds through them giving them a cohesiveness. Only one chapter, “Dades Gorge,” seemed out of place, and I am slightly mystified as to why it was included. Also, after Tom began exhibiting symptoms of schizophrenia, Sardy focuses on him and puts aside the thread of her mother; I would have liked their stories as they affected Sardy to be more integrated.
The Edge of Schizophrenia cuts deeply and though the story is often painful, it reveals in beautiful prose a family’s struggle with this mental illness that is still often misunderstood. The book will appeal to those who enjoy readings memoirs as well as anyone who desires an intimate account of living with a family member having this condition.
Thank you to NetGalley and Pantheon Books for providing an advance reading copy in exchange for an honest review.
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July 17, 2019
Feeling fractured, and also more whole. Four stars.
May 28, 2019
An extraordinary memoir--a brilliant, beautiful, heart-wrenching work. The book also has an interesting structure: in addition to the deeply compelling family story, the author adds in some thoughtful, measured, cautious, yet stimulating science writing.
March 23, 2021
This book explores the depths of schizophrenia, family dynamics, and the concept of identity in a more personal and enlightening way then I have read in a very long time.
I may have never been as moved by a book as I was by this one.
Read it.
I may have never been as moved by a book as I was by this one.
Read it.
October 15, 2019
It very much read like a sketch. Even though parts of it was interesting, I was largely disoriented.
December 27, 2023
I was doing research on schizophrenia for something I am writing and came across this book in my local library. My goal was to skim it to find the parts that reveal the behavioral characteristics of the author's mother and brother, both of whom were assessed to be afflicted by the disease. Instead, I found myself compelled to read it cover-to-cover because it is much more about the mind and what motivates behavior of all sorts, healthy or otherwise and told simply yet elegantly by the author, Marin Sardy.
I admit I chafed at how the author told of her own life, in part because of the things she did not tell. Marin Sardy and I share little in terms of how we think and how we grew up. My impression is that she was a self-centered poor little rich girl who had frequent, extended vacations in multiple exotic places paid for seemingly from family money; worked odd, random jobs, less for the money than for something to do break up monotony; and was largely isolated from the stresses and strains of society as a whole.
I think the book would have benefited from her acknowledging straight out that these special circumstances--ones most people don't have--establish the backdrop of her life and enabled her to be who she is. Among other things, this would help the reader understand her ability to spend so much of her time trying to discover what makes herself tick (such as her unique use of Wiccan practices to conduct deep introspection).
o She never seemed to look at herself in the context of other women--most far less privileged--or of the socio-cultural environment in which she lived.
o The only thing along these lines that she seemed concerned about was how men viewed her body (and even there, she was offended when men began to notice her body yet deliberately dressed and behaved in ways that sought their attraction).
o She views her mother's schizophrenia much more from the perspective of her own loss of her mother's attention, rather than from whether her mother was suffering beyond the disease's interference with the traditional ways mothers connect with children (her mother had inherited money that kept her afloat, allowing her to pivot to another location when her delusions pressed her to do so).
The context of the Sardy family is all the more important when examining the life of Tom, the author's brother, who was afflicted by schizophrenia. After years of suffering with the disease and the challenge of finding effective treatment, Tom finally reached the point where everything good remaining in his life mobilized around him in ways that seemed to prepare and enable him to live a "normal" life. With his family's resources, love, and active support combined with the mental health care provided by the city of Anchorage--which seemed to be at least a cut above what other localities in the US provide--it seems that no other victim of schizophrenia could be expected to do better than Tom. Yet, he killed himself.
What if anything could have been done differently at any point in Tom's life to change this outcome haunts the author and her family and any caring reader of this memoir. The reader feels this impact not just because Marin Sardy has written about Tom so well--straightforwardly, in some cases clinically, and never maudlinly or overemotionally--but also because Tom's story is not unique: many people who suffer from severe mental illness pursue a similar path, too often with the same outcome.
The bottom line is, despite my criticism, I am very glad I happened upon The Edge of Every Day, and highly recommend it.
I admit I chafed at how the author told of her own life, in part because of the things she did not tell. Marin Sardy and I share little in terms of how we think and how we grew up. My impression is that she was a self-centered poor little rich girl who had frequent, extended vacations in multiple exotic places paid for seemingly from family money; worked odd, random jobs, less for the money than for something to do break up monotony; and was largely isolated from the stresses and strains of society as a whole.
I think the book would have benefited from her acknowledging straight out that these special circumstances--ones most people don't have--establish the backdrop of her life and enabled her to be who she is. Among other things, this would help the reader understand her ability to spend so much of her time trying to discover what makes herself tick (such as her unique use of Wiccan practices to conduct deep introspection).
o She never seemed to look at herself in the context of other women--most far less privileged--or of the socio-cultural environment in which she lived.
o The only thing along these lines that she seemed concerned about was how men viewed her body (and even there, she was offended when men began to notice her body yet deliberately dressed and behaved in ways that sought their attraction).
o She views her mother's schizophrenia much more from the perspective of her own loss of her mother's attention, rather than from whether her mother was suffering beyond the disease's interference with the traditional ways mothers connect with children (her mother had inherited money that kept her afloat, allowing her to pivot to another location when her delusions pressed her to do so).
The context of the Sardy family is all the more important when examining the life of Tom, the author's brother, who was afflicted by schizophrenia. After years of suffering with the disease and the challenge of finding effective treatment, Tom finally reached the point where everything good remaining in his life mobilized around him in ways that seemed to prepare and enable him to live a "normal" life. With his family's resources, love, and active support combined with the mental health care provided by the city of Anchorage--which seemed to be at least a cut above what other localities in the US provide--it seems that no other victim of schizophrenia could be expected to do better than Tom. Yet, he killed himself.
What if anything could have been done differently at any point in Tom's life to change this outcome haunts the author and her family and any caring reader of this memoir. The reader feels this impact not just because Marin Sardy has written about Tom so well--straightforwardly, in some cases clinically, and never maudlinly or overemotionally--but also because Tom's story is not unique: many people who suffer from severe mental illness pursue a similar path, too often with the same outcome.
The bottom line is, despite my criticism, I am very glad I happened upon The Edge of Every Day, and highly recommend it.
July 26, 2020
The Edge of Every Day, by Marin Sardy; Pantheon: New Yoirk; $25.95 hardback
What do you think of when you hear about mental illness? Marin Sardy, noted essayist, offers an extremely important and personal memoir. Her magnificent collection of reflections, of Sketches of Schizophenia, is at once poignant, incredibly well researched in the annals of science, history, and culture, and covers a theme seldom addressed. Her prism to do so is personal. We learn that her life is affected in so many ways by her mother's schizophrenia and brother's similar ailments. It ran in the family.
Why should we, in this our Twenty-first Century, still deal with this disease as if it were some sort of tragic, bizarre side show, if we speak of it at all? And that is the problem, writ large, in this country. We still act as if someone suffering from schizophrenia is not one of us, a fellow human who deserves care and love, and above all treatment.
Sardy is aware that there are those who seek to know, as if in some sort of carnival freak show, about the strange and outlandish behaviors manifested by the sufferers. This book does not remark, beyond the necessary, on these actions. In her life there was 'Gram Julia' who feared Japanese spies with radios in her home in Chicago. Or Julia's son whose odd fears would seem to dissolve into general paranoia. Throughout all these revelations, however, Sardy is careful to show that now, neuroscience has revealed there is no one title for such illness. Manic Depression was at one time a 'catch all' phrase, and now it is known that there are a host of sub categories of mental health illnesses. We learn that the brain is so complicated that to understand even a small part of it can be a monumental undertaking.
We discover that Sardy's story doesn't end happily. Her brother, living homeless, seen occasionally by friends and given a buck or two, dies as a consequence of his illness. Sardy tell us, care. On a personal level, there are organizations to help mental illness. On a larger level, make the country take responsibility for this, reopen mental health clinics. Don't send people with this type illness to jail, just because it is a place to warehouse them. Help them.
Sardy's book is actually many essays on this common theme. They are in some cases linear chapters, in others, not. Each tells an aspect of a lifetime dealing with this in her family, her immediate family, and how it affected her life and those around her. Care. This is a magnificent book. It whispers, 'Do something to help the mentally ill.'
December 9, 2025
The Edge of Every Day is a collection of essays Marin Sardy has written about caring about family members who have schizophrenia. The book's earliest essays are about her mother's schizophrenia - Sardy's mom, although never officially diagnosed, began to exhibit symptoms when Sardy was about 10 years old, and she hesitantly writes about what it was like growing up with a mother suffering from delusions. Actually, she writes more of what it was like for her siblings and other relatives, apparently struggling to dive into her own experience.
Then her brother Tom begins to show symptoms, and in the essay exploring her time with him as his disease becomes apparent, Sardy is able to eloquently share how hard it was to not only witness his descent into madness, but how she actively tries to avoid recognizing his illness. Breaking through the denial was a process, as was coming into her own feelings about the experience. This essay marked the beginning of the rest of the book - the essays about her relationship with her brother, the progression of his disease and how desperate she became to save him - especially as he was living on the streets in Alaska, even in the winter.
Each essay in this collection has its own style, contributing a bit of disjointedness. However, this seemed appropriate given the experiences Sardy describes. Her emotional journey through this story was bumpy, treading into the unknown, and wanting to save her sibling from himself.
Mostly, this is a book about grief, in all its many forms. Sardy doesn't want to acknowledge her grief, but eventually she has no choice. Emotionally moving book.
Then her brother Tom begins to show symptoms, and in the essay exploring her time with him as his disease becomes apparent, Sardy is able to eloquently share how hard it was to not only witness his descent into madness, but how she actively tries to avoid recognizing his illness. Breaking through the denial was a process, as was coming into her own feelings about the experience. This essay marked the beginning of the rest of the book - the essays about her relationship with her brother, the progression of his disease and how desperate she became to save him - especially as he was living on the streets in Alaska, even in the winter.
Each essay in this collection has its own style, contributing a bit of disjointedness. However, this seemed appropriate given the experiences Sardy describes. Her emotional journey through this story was bumpy, treading into the unknown, and wanting to save her sibling from himself.
Mostly, this is a book about grief, in all its many forms. Sardy doesn't want to acknowledge her grief, but eventually she has no choice. Emotionally moving book.
December 21, 2022
I can’t remember the last time I made it through a book so quickly. Marin Sandy tells the story of her family’s history with schizophrenia and what she has learned in trying to understand.
That her mother was able to live independently, without medication, and with plenty of delusional thinking was impressive. Her brother, Tom, had a much more troubling time with it. I feel for his father that had to decide whether to accept Tom’s decision to decline help and medication while remaining living at home or setting a boundary that living at home meant seeking help. A parent will always second guess these hard choices, but there is no simple answer.
The more we discuss mental health and mental illness, the more people gain understanding of what’s required to help those suffering. Changes are being made all the time. Long gone are the days of leaving people in institutions ~ out of sight, out of mind. Now, to get past these days of leaving them to fend for themselves on the streets, homeless: Only able to access help if they have the wherewithal to understand they need medication and assistance. It’s promising that although it happened too late for Tom, Housing First initiatives are now understood to be a better approach ~ i.e. first get the suffering person housed, then address medication and assistance.
May 17, 2020
THE EDGE OF EVERY DAY is a beautiful, and painful, memoir from Marin Sardy about the heartache and trauma of having family members diagnosed with schizophrenia. Told in essay form, Sardy’s writing cuts deep and leaves you breathless, while at the same time is a searing indictment of how people with mental illnesses are treated in this country. I went into it thinking it was about her mother’s struggle with the disease, but it ends up being much more about Marin’s brother Tom and the tragedy of their relationship. I so felt for Tom, and Marin of course, and their story is the heart, and heartbreak, of the book. It is am important and humanizing read for anyone who knows those who struggle with loved ones with mental illness, or doesn’t know much about the subject. It’s not an easy read, by any means, but Marin makes the subject matter urgent and accessible through the structure of a memoir.
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