Staekly honest and deeply moving, this is John Thorndike's riveting story of raising his son alone as his wife slides inexorably into madness. John discovered early on how all-consuming it is to raise a child. Yet the rewards were enormous, and seldom has a child been so alive on a page.
I grew up in Connecticut, read a thousand novels as a child and always wanted to write one. 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 the delirious sixties, marriage and parenthood. In 1970 my wife and I moved to an isolated farm in Chile, where we lived for two years. When we divorced in 1974, I wound up with custody of our son, Janir.
I settled with him in Athens, Ohio, where for ten years I ran a truck farm. I built some houses, ran an alternative school and started writing, both freelance and fiction. My first two books were novels: Anna Delaney's Child, about a woman whose nine-year-old son dies in a car crash, and The Potato Baron, about a married couple struggling to decide whose life they are going to live. I moved to Colorado for five years and to New Mexico for eight, before coming back to Ohio. My third book was a memoir about raising my son in the face of his mother's schizophrenia: Another Way Home.
In 2005 I moved to Cape Cod to look after my father, whose Alzheimer's was growing worse. He wanted to go on living at home, and I wanted to let him. My latest book, The Last of His Mind, is a memoir of the year he lost everything---even as the two of us grew closer than we'd been since I was a child.
