Life Inside: A Memoir [Paperback]

Mindy Lewis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2003

The patient is an ascetically pretty 15½-year-old white female. She is intelligent, fearful, extremely anxious, and depressed. Her rage is poorly controlled and inappropriately expressed.

Diagnostic Impression: Program for social recovery in a supportive and structured environment appears favorable.

Life Inside

In 1967, three months before her sixteenth birthday, Mindy Lewis was sent to a state psychiatric hospital by court order. She had been skipping school, smoking pot, and listening to too much Dylan. Her mother, at a loss for what else to do, decided that Mindy remain in state custody until she turned eighteen and became a legal, law-abiding, "healthy" adult.

Life Inside is Mindy's story about her coming-of-age during those tumultuous years. In honest, unflinching prose, she paints a richly textured portrait of her stay on a psychiatric ward -- the close bonds and rivalries among adolescent patients, the politics and routines of institutional life, the extensive use of medication, and the prevalence of life-altering misdiagnoses. But this memoir also takes readers on a journey of recovery as Lewis describes her emergence into adulthood and her struggle to transcend the stigma of institutionalization. Bracingly told, and often terrifying in its truths, Life Inside is a life-affirming memoir that informs as it inspires.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the tradition of Girl, Interrupted and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Lewis details her often harrowing experiences as an adolescent trapped in a psychiatric hospital and her more than 30-year recovery and redemption from having been diagnosed schizophrenic at age 15. Skipping school, experimenting with drugs and raging against an overbearing mother were Lewis's rather typical acts of 1960s-style rebellion, yet they earned her 28 months of institutionalization and intensive regimens of psychotropic medication. During her hospitalization, Lewis was kept in pajamas (to discourage escape attempts), which only encouraged sexual experimentation with other patients. Suicide attempts were rife, too, and several of her closest friends succeeded. Lewis broke free from this maelstrom at age 18, when she could no longer be held against her will. She attended college, tried various therapies, joined the Mental Patients Liberation Project, and developed long-dormant artistic skills. She also found herself caring for her dying father. Jobs came and went, as did her depression and anger, yet the will to survive never abandoned her. In the spirit of the work of R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz, Lewis's story calls into question the very definition of mental illness and the system that makes such determinations. After accessing her medical records with the diagnosis of chronic schizophrenia she declared, "I do not believe it. I was never schizophrenic. Not then, not now." Now a visual artist and writer, Lewis provides a moving, poignant and enraging, yet redemptive, account of one woman's refusal to accept victimization, powerfully told in vivid, poetic prose.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Artist and writer Lewis had a tough adolescence. At 15, she was remanded to a mental hospital and not released until she legally became an adult three years later. The first section of this intimate memoir is an account of those years. The second section brings the story up to date, incorporating Lewis's recent exploration into her medical records and a return visit to the hospital. There she talks to a psychiatrist who tells her that chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia was "obviously an incorrect diagnosis." Lewis's first-person, present-tense writing style gives an intensely vivid picture of what it was like to come of age during those years. The author openly discusses the friendships, the politics of institutional life, the medication, the sex and dope (arranged with staff help), and the wonderful English teacher. Her occasional use of actual clinical case notes is effectively jarring and works well with the story. However, this kind of first-person narrative does not serve Lewis as well in the second part, which could have benefited from some judicious editing and narrative framing. Recommended for memoir collections in public libraries and for history of psychiatry collections. [Lewis's essays have been published in the Lilith magazine and appear in two recent anthologies, Escaping the Yellow Wallpaper and Voices from the Couch.-Ed.]-Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., C.
--Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Washington Square Press (November 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743411501
• ISBN-13: 978-0743411509
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #767,938 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mindy Lewis is a writer and visual artist based in New York City. Mer memoir, "Life Inside" (Washington Square Press 2003), described in a starred Kirkus review as "complex, chilling, luminous," was named a "Book of the Year" by The American Journal of Nursing and an Elle magazine "Must Read." Ms. Lewis is also editor of the anthology "DIRT: The Quirks, Habits and Passions of Keeping House" (Seal Press 2009; www.dirtthebook.com), in which 38 contemporary writers explore their thoughts and feelings about cleaning, dirt, dust, and clutter. Her essays have been published in Newsweek, Lilith, Body & Soul, and Poets & Writers magazines, and in anthologies. Ms. Lewis teaches writing workshops at The Writer's Voice of the Westside YMCA and at Brooklyn College, and has been a visiting writer at Empire State College/SUNY and at George Mason University. For more information: http://www.mindylewis.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sheer admiration, October 18, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Life Inside (Hardcover)

This is the rare book that sends chills up the spine, tears down your face, and on multiple occasions make you laugh aloud. More importantly, this book made me pause and think deeply about the issues Lewis raises regarding the lines between sanity and insanity, the uses and misuses of various therapies and medications by the psychiatric community, and the long-term implications of a scarred adolescence. The author is not only an excellent writer, she is an incredibly brave person to have written such a book. Blows away Susanna Kaysen's "Girl, Interrrupted" with its vivid portrayal of daily life inside a mental institution and its equally important depiction of what happens once you escape such a place (something Kaysen's book did not cover). Lewis's self-portayal is honest and full, her characters are vividly drawn, and you really get a sense of what drove her mother, her doctors, her attendents, her feloow inmates, and herself to behave the way they did -- creating a difficult situation and then enduring it. I'm giving this book to all my friends -- even those who don't normally read memoirs -- because Lewis' book is so much more than that.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Path From Hellish Adolescence to Creative, Joyous Adulthood, December 13, 2002

By 

capitol reader (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Life Inside (Hardcover)

I'm a memoir junkie, and this is one of the most rewarding, carefully written memoirs I have ever read. Lewis insightfully describes each stage of her rich transition from searingly painful adolescence to self-actualized adulthood. I marvel at her narrative's double-voice: she accurately conveys both adolescent self-doubt and emotionally-attuned adult wisdom.
Readers who will particularly appreciate this book include lovers of well-wrought prose, and people who feel impaired by something in their past, and cautiously optimistic about their chances of getting over it and/or growing from it.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A woman comes to terms, October 18, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Life Inside (Hardcover)

This remarkable work describes the harrowing, yet in some ways winsome experience of a remarkable child of the 60s raised in the home of divorced parents and forever rebelling against her 'perfect mother.' At the outset, Mindy is on her way to the institution that is to be her home for 2 1/2 years and most of this memoir is devoted to those times - a life inside with the others inside, those that are patients, those that are employees, and those that are the professionals. Mindy has gone through her medical records of those days and peppered her
historical descriptions with the views of her psychiatrists as outlined in those records. The life inside is intimately and thoroughly described and one feels not only the horror, the bondings, and the feeling of abandonment, but the eventual resignation. Mindy will come to terms with her issues, her parents and herself as described in the life outside that is the book's second portion. She comes to see 'the other side'. The memoir is written with remarkable sensitivity and emotional candor.