Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness [Hardcover]

Greg Bottoms (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 7, 2000

"My brother saw the face of God. You never recover from a trauma like that."

So begins Angelhead, a taut, powerful memoir of the madness and crime that rips a family apart.

"I didn't see God, of course, but I saw my brother seeing God; I saw how petrified he was, how convinced."

Set in Tidewater, Virginia, in the 1980s and early 1990s, Angelhead documents the violent, drug-addled, schizophrenic descent of the author's brother, Michael. Commencing with Michael's first psychotic break at age 14 -- high on acid, seeing God in his suburban bedroom window -- through a series of petty crimes, bizarre disappearances, and suicide attempts to the shocking crime that landed him in the psychiatric wing of a maximum security prison, Angelhead enables us to witness firsthand, as never before, the fragmenting of a mind and a family.

"I knew, still know, that he saw, in some form, His or Her or Its face."

Bottoms shows, in pitch-perfect prose and with great empathy and dramatic tension, the psychological decline of his brother as he becomes obsessed first with heavy metal music, martial arts, and the occult, and then with the more bizarre aspects of Christianity. We not only see the effects Michael's odd and increasingly violent behavior has on the people around him, but also come to understand how the author, now a successful writer and journalist, used the power of language and storytelling both to save himself and to forgive his brother. With the fast pace and seamless structure of the best crime writing and the moral sophistication and depth of our finest literature, Angelhead will challenge what we know about mental illness and its impact on us all. It is a brilliant work of unusual intensity.

"In his room he was having his first of many psychotic breaks. It came in the form of crippling guilt, ruthless introspection. He was Jesus being scolded by an angry Father. He wore sin, all sin, heavy as lead shackles. God made him look at himself and he was a stone with a minuscule heart."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When he was 10 years old, the author watched as his brother Michael lost his mind. High on LSD and screaming uncontrollably because God was torturing him, the 14-year-old smashed everything in his bedroom, his feet red with blood from broken glass. Michael collected snakes and let them slither around his naked body; he beat Greg nearly senseless, then smashed his own forehead into a sharp branch in repentance; he stayed up all night, watching Christian television or "puzzling over his strange and cruel distance from God." Their parents, preoccupied by the ceaseless work that had taken them from a dirt-poor Virginia town to an affluent suburb that they really couldn't afford, thought drugs the problem and throwing Michael out the answer. Not until 1977, when he was 21, did they learn that he was an acute paranoid schizophrenic, so severely mentally ill that he probably would never be healed, although medication might control his behavior. Michael became increasingly dangerous, but could not be institutionalized against his will; when he set their house on fire in 1993, the father's reaction was relief: "This was the best thing that could have happened.... He'll be put away." He was, and, Bottoms acknowledges, "We've all found a peace without Michael that we're not willing to give up." There's no false sentiment in this unflinching memoir of a family that's alienated, instead of united, by tragedy: "We all hid from each other," Bottoms writes with characteristic candor. "We shared a space, a roof, nothing else." There is, however, tremendous sorrow for a blighted life and the havoc that it wrought. Bottoms's finely crafted prose offers no consolation or easy answers--simply emotional precision and the satisfaction of hard truth. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

One of the most harrowing portraits of madness in recent memory, Bottoms's memoir documents the unraveling of his older brother in skillful, off-center prose. The chaosAof mental deterioration, family denial, God obsession and terrorAbegins in the 1980s, in the Bottomses' suburban home in Tidewater, Va. Fourteen-year-old Michael, high on LSD, believes he sees the face of God and briefly descends into a psychotic fit. From there, Bottoms follows his brother's fall from sanity in a series of misadventures that carve away Michael's humanityAhomelessness; suicide attempts with Drano and hanging; sudden disappearances, sometimes to other states. The boy's parents watch his mental vanishing act with stoicism, more worried about the opinions of their prosperous neighbors than the health of their son. When Michael rapidly falls apart after a brutal trauma, the family's rage and frustration corrodes most of their remaining goodwillAhe is jeopardizing their hard-won facade of happiness, destroying their hopes for normalcy. Throughout the book, Bottoms, whose work has appeared in the online magazines Salon, Feed and Nerve, candidly discloses his feelings of shame, fear and sympathy for his brother, as well as his disdain for his parents' handling of the crisis. Though the prose is occasionally flat in comparison to the crises it recounts, and bookstore browsers will have to get past the lackluster jacket, this memoir will rivet readers in their 20s and 30s who are interested in schizophrenia.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Crown; 1 edition (November 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609606263
• ISBN-13: 978-0609606261
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #799,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Family's Descent into Chaos, May 27, 2001

By 

Mary Esterhammer-Fic (Morgan Park, Chicago IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness (Hardcover)

Greg Bottoms is a fine writer: honest and brave. In ANGELHEAD, he describes a tormented, mentally ill sibling, and he exposes the pain the illness brought on the whole family.

From the outside, the Bottoms family was middle-class suburban. When his older brother Michael began experiencing psychotic episodes, though, that world was turned upside-down. A few neighbors and friends glimpsed what was going on, but the day-to-day tension of living with a man who could, in an instant, turn violently delusional must have been nerve-wracking for Greg and his parents.

At first, Michael's erratic behavior was attributed to recreational drugs or a lack of self-discipline. It wasn't until the Bottoms family was faced with the diagnosis of schizophrenia that Michael craziness finally made sense. Michael destroyed their home, and their lives; he drained their emotional resources, he even tried to kill them. They doggedly tried to stand by him and get help for him, but it wasn't enough.

Is every schizophrenic as scary or sad as Michael? No--Greg points out again and again that Michael's case was extreme, not all people with this problem are violent or unmanageable.

The real tragedy of this case is that Michael could only get the help he needed after he committed a serious crime, one that nearly claimed the lives of Greg's parents and brother Ron.

I know people who grew up in homes with a mentally-ill family member. Most "outsiders" would question whether this sort of thing can happen, if it isn't an exaggeration. Well, it does indeed happen, and it leaves scars on everyone. Greg Bottoms had the courage to come forward and share what he went through. There are many, many families out there who need to read this book, to know they are not alone.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An incredible read!, August 10, 2001

By 

J. Lyda (Raleigh, North Carolina) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness (Hardcover)

I almost did not pick up this book due to the subject matter - too depressing. But I did pick it up, I read it, and I have no regrets. Yes, it is a terrible sad story of the horrific effects of mental illness on one young man and his entire family. But the story is told so well, so cleanly by Greg Bottoms that I could not put it down after the first page. Bottoms touches all the bases, including the differing theories on the causes and treatment of schizophrenia. He admits the tragic truth that what happens to these poor people is very much a mystery. That aside, the story itself is riveting and frequently scary (the 'smell' of madness....). At the end I was filled with sadness and compassion for this family. And I will look for more writings by Greg Bottoms who showed so much courage and heart in opening his painful world for us to see. Read it!

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A strange and beautiful book, December 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into Madness (Hardcover)

I was very moved by this book--to tears, which is unheard of for me. How Greg Bottoms gets into his brother's head creates amazing feeling. I couldn't explain how he does it. I'm no critic, alas, just an avid reader, particularly of books having to do with abnormal psychology, and also Southern literature. One of the reviewers below didn't like this tact (the same person mentions a trial when in fact there is no trial, only an admission of guilt to arson and attempted murder and then a sentence to the psych ward of a maximum security prison). To me this kind of imaginative writing and conjecture as to the state of the subject's mind during his crimes made what could have just been an interesting memoir into a special one, even a great one. I felt this rose above the level of personal tragedy and said something important about illness, family, and even contemporary society. Fine work, indeed.