Can You See Me? [Paperback]

Ami Sands Brodoff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1999

What happens when the person you love most, best, falls prey to schizophrenia? Can You See Me? is the story of Doren and Sarah Solomon, a brother and sister so close they share a secret place, imaginary world, and private language during childhood. While Sarah eventually grows up and relinquishes their private haven, for Doren, it becomes a way of life he never surrenders. Sarah struggles to help Doren, even to save him, without truly understanding the consequences. Told in the voices of Sarah and Doren, Can You See Me? is a powerful psychodrama portraying schizophrenia from the inside-out.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this earnest, well-meaning first novel, one family's way of coping with the trauma, shame and secrecy of mental illness is explored through two alternating points of view, those of Sarah Solomon and her 25-year-old brother, Doren, a diagnosed schizophrenic. Sarah, 24, had severed contact with her brother, but when her parents, both psychiatrists, ask her to look after him at their home while they attend a psychiatric meeting in Las Vegas, she agrees. As children, the siblings shared a secret world of their own creation known as Zehr, a realm inhabited by the elephant Eliah and the Ivory Queen. Long outgrown by Sarah, Zehr remains real to Doren. Weaving in and out of lucidity, he doesn't always take his medication, telling Sarah it leaves him feeling like one of the "living dead." Reminded of their strong bond as children and newly sympathetic to her brother, Sarah takes Doren to live with her, instead of bringing him back to the hospital where he's scheduled to be admitted. Doren promises to take his medication and see a psychiatrist on a regular basis, but when Sarah becomes romantically involved with her landlord, her brother fears abandonment. After trashing Sarah's room and attacking her, he takes off in his car and aimlessly drifts around the country, gradually falling in with a group of other mentally ill homeless people. The suffering of the Solomon family makes this heartfelt work occasionally painful to read, and the author's ambitious attempt to recreate Doren's schizophrenic viewpoint is too awkward and abstract to be convincing. Even so, Brodoff's unpretentious tenor and narrative consistency balance her unwieldy subject and make this a genuinely moving novel.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

AMI SANDS BRODOFF is an award-winning fiction and features writer. Her short stories appear in leading literary journals, such as TriQuarterly, Confrontation, Denver Quarterly, and Quarterly West. Several have garnered prizes and been anthologized; Ms. Brodoff was awarded the River City Fellowship in Fiction, as well as fellowships to Yaddo and The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her articles on psychology and health are featured in Vogue, Self, Elle and The Schizophrenia Bulletin, a publication of the National Institute of Mental Health. Can You See Me? is her first novel; she is also the author of a volume of stories, Bloodknots. Ms. Brodoff teaches creative writing at the Princeton Adult School and has offered workshops at Fountain House in New York City, a model program for people with schizophrenia. She lives in Princeton, N.J. with her husband and children and is at work on a new novel.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Xlibris Corp; 1 edition (August 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738803677
• ISBN-13: 978-0738803678
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,617,664 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ami Sands Brodoff is an award-winning novelist and short story author. Her latest novel, The White Space Between, about a mother and daughter grappling with the impact of the Holocaust, is the winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction. It is a love song to Ami's adopted home city of Montreal and a love story. Her volume of thematically-linked stories, Bloodknots, about the ties that bind people together and the ones that unravel without warning, was a finalist for the Re-Lit Award, honoring the best work from the Indies in Canada. An excerpt of Ami's debut novel, Can You See Me? about a family struggling with schizophrenia, was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Ami has won fellowships to Yaddo, The Virginia Center of the Creative Arts, The St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity in Malta, The Ragdale Foundation and the Julia and David Arts Foundation in Costa Rica.

Ami Sands Brodoff's fiction centers on characters en extremis. She believes people reveal their truest, deepest selves then they are up against it.

Ami is active in Montreal's literary community, teaching workshops, and serving on the Executive of the Quebec Writers' Association. She makes frequent trips back to her beloved birth-place New York City and misses it in her soul.

She is now at work on a new novel and lives in Montreal with her husband, children and Hollywood star of Bernese Mountain dog, Monty Booh, who by-the-way was the inspiration for one of the best loved characters in The White Space Between.

To learn more about Ami, to invite her to teach a workshop, or to chat with her directly, visit her website at Amisandsbrodoff.com and her blog chez-ami.blogspot.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Review excerpt from The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, July 2001, July 15, 2001

By 

Martin A. Silverman (Maplewood, N.J.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Can You See Me? (Paperback)

"This is a moving novel about the intertwined lives of a brilliant young man who succumbs in adolescence to the ravages of schizophrenia and his devoted but bewildered younger sister, who suffers along with him from that time onward. It will be of interest to anyone who cares not merely about emotionally troubled individuals, but also about the others in their lives who are in their own way affected by the emotional problems that afflict them.

"Ms. Brodoff knows first-hand what she is writing about. This story has clearly emerged not only out of her creative imagination, but also out of her own personal experience.

"The reader is led on an odyssey that weaves back and forth between the tortured travails of Doren as he struggles with his illness and those of his sister Sarah, as she struggles with the impact of her brother's schizophrenia.

"As psychoanalysts, we cannot afford to give oursleves the luxury of ignoring the people in a patient's external world as we delve into his or her inner one. We can be grateful to authors like Brodoff for reminding us of what we need to do."

5.0 out of 5 stars "HEARTFELT,AMBITIOUS;...GENUINELY MOVING" PUB.WKLY. 10/18/99, February 1, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Can You See Me? (Hardcover)

Heartfelt, ambitious; one family's way of coping with the trauma, shame and secrecy of mental illness. A genuinely moving novel. (Publishers Weekly review, October 18, 1999)

4.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written, poignant and evocative story., November 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Can You See Me? (Hardcover)

Just because of illness, a family's love for one of its own never waivers - it just becomes harder