Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness and Survival : A Memoir [Paperback]

Jay Neugeboren (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1998

Anyone who has ever loved an emotionally troubled person will draw inspiration from this remarkable story of brotherly love Jay Neugeboren and his brother, Robert, grew up in Brooklyn in the years following World War II. Both brothers--smart, popular, and well-adjusted--seemed well on the way to successful lives when for reasons that remain mysterious to this day Robert had a mental breakdown at age nineteen. For the past thirty years Jay has been not only his brother's friend and confidante, but his sole caretaker as Robert continues to suffer from the ravages of chronic mental illness, which has also kept him institutionalized for most of his life.

Imagining Robert is the most honest book to date on the lives of the millions of families that must cope, day by day and year by year, over the course of a lifetime, with a condition for which, in most cases, there is no cure. By rendering his brother in all his complexity and mystery, Jay Neugeboren has shown how even the grimmest of lives can be sustained by the power of love.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Imagining Robert is an account of Robert Neugeboren's 30-year history of mental illness. In this moving memoir, his brother Jay describes the tragedy of psychosis and illustrates the redemptive power of writing. The author imagines his brother as two people--one hospitalized, the other communicative and lucid--and crafts a story of his brother's thoughts by weaving together Robert's exquisitely written letters about this unfolding family tragedy. The instability of the author's own children and his manipulative mother's affliction with Alzheimer's disease multiply the pressure he feels, threatening his own mental health. His careful words seem an attempt to organize the confusion around him. The imagined friendship with the brother he lovingly cares for serves as an important source of self-examination. Neugeboren's prose restores his brother's dignity by refusing to let the details of how Robert has suffered in psychiatric institutions go unrecorded. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist Neugeboren (An Orphan's Tale) has written a detailed, exquisitely painful and always thoughtful account of his younger brother's long struggle with mental illness. He includes scenes from their Brooklyn childhood of constantly warring parents, extremes of love and hatred, of holding on too tightly and rejecting too absolutely. Robert Neugeboren, who was born in 1943, suffers from a variety of disorders, all roughly grouped together under schizophrenia. He has needed long periods of restraint and multiple hospital stays. His 30-year battle has coincided frighteningly with numerous changes in our attitudes toward and treatment of such illness. Shuttled from doctor to doctor, Robert has been dosed with almost every polysyllabic wonder drug that has surfaced. Some worked; some didn't. None offered the "magic bullet" that the author hoped and prayed for. Neither did such bizarre fads as putting patients into insulin-induced comas. The narrative touches on the author's parallel life as a writer, academic, divorce and father of two and is shot through with an understandable sense of guilt. Could the family have done more? Would greater financial resources have changed Robert's chances for a normal life? The banal dysfunction of the New York State mental health establishment is horrifying in this portrayal, yet, to most readers of the daily newspaper, totally expected. Nothing is solved here, but Neugeboren's account may bring understanding to those who can barely imagine such horrors and comfort to those who have and have felt alone. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 305 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co (P) (April 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805057307
• ISBN-13: 978-0805057300
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,985,247 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well worth reading., January 5, 2000

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness and Survival : A Memoir (Paperback)

As someone who has made a career of helping the mentally ill, This book broke my heart. Yet I believed the problems existed as stated.

As the parent of a child who, as a teen, developed the need for the safety of psychiatric hospitals, I cried for Jay and his family.

As someone who became clinically depressed after my child's serious suicide attempt, I easily understood the need for what sometimes seemed like unrealistic optimism.

This book offers something for anyone involved with people who are mentally ill. Read it. Keep it. Learn from it.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Moving Memoir, August 3, 2006

By 

C. Pajor (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness, and Survival, A Memoir (Paperback)

I absolutely loved this book. Reviewers here have complained that it's not just about Robert, but about the author and his life. I loved that fact. I too have a brother w/ a mental illness, and I too am a teacher and I like to write. I found all of these stories -- the story of Robert, Jay's connection to him, Jay's struggle to tell Robert's story, and Jay's life as a father -- all equally compelling. I finished the book in 2 days and sent an effusive email to the author, who sent me a kind email back that very same day. This book moved me deeply, made me think and want to write.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Moving account, April 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness and Survival : A Memoir (Paperback)

Through this first-hand account the author provides insight into the fumblings of the psychiatric system and how its dealings over three decades with the severly disturbed remain consistantly lacking in focus and purpose beyond attempting to quell "inappropriate" behaviour.

The minute of detail in the work feels, at first, a bit excessive. However, the work gains momentum as one is drawn into the dynamics of Robert and his relationship to the larger world of relatives, friends and worldly experiences.

What emerges is the picture of a person much richer than the stigma of schizophrenia can detract from: a human being who must be taken in total as such, rather than merely a collection of psychiatric symptoms.

The author presents a model of how compassion, family, and friends may not "cure" such a devistating illness, but can contribute to making such a difficult life take on worthwhile meaning.

And through these recollections of his brother, the author gives Robert a presence in the world far beyond the walls of his confinement.

D.P. Hoffman Houston, TX