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My Brother's Madness: A Memoir

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Paul Pines bared his life story in "My Brother's Madness" in a way that few would have the courage to expose. When I finished the book, I felt blown away. In reading his work, I found parts of my own life unfolding in ways I never truly understood before. His description of burying himself in books and the reasons for that gave me a common bond with Paul. I always held the belief that I buried myself in books to lock out the dysfunctional world I had to exist in as a child. Now I understand a different meaning: trying to find the relationships I needed but did not exist around me in real life. Instead, I was looking for them in imaginary worlds between two covers. "My Brother's Madness," is a book I had difficulty in putting down. Paul Pines has a special kind of empathy rarely found in today's social order, which flows with every page turned in this truly remarkable work.

"My Brother's Madness"

Paul Pines' "My Brother's Madness" is a remarkable portrayal of both the causes and effects of his brother Claude's schizophrenia and of his own never-ending efforts to help him survive it, if not conquer it.

Pines paints a vast panorama of two lives, of their genetic, familial, societal and personal elements, told in the fascinating day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year details of a sometimes rewarding, often frustrating and frequently exasperating ---but always loving---brotherhood. There are many times you want to laugh, yet you know that soon you will have to cry.

Reading the memoir, I was transported into the brothers' family, into the minds and hearts of their parents and of the brothers themselves. I thought their every thought, lived their every experience, felt their every emotion. And, like the author, as much as I learned, I came to know that there is much I will never know.

Which makes me appreciate his efforts even more.

"My Brother's Madness" is a monumental work.

Howard Rayfiel

In My Brother Madness, Paul Pines shares the story of his brother's Claude's declining mental health. The book's structure allows the reader to get know Paul and Claude by alternating between childhood memories and scenes of Claude as an adult descending into and struggling with mental illness. It doesn't seem as if the childhood memories were shared to analyze or explain the why of Claude's illness. Instead, the reader is left to draw their own conclusions as they come to know Paul and Claude and ties that bind them.

Without protraying himself as hero or savior, Pines shares the guilt, frustration and challenges of caring for his brother. Amazingly, at the same time,he unassumingly inspires the reader to see the ways these disproportionate relationships can positively shape and add value to our lives.

Most importantly, is the fact that this book does truly achieve the old cliché of "putting a real face to mental illness". Something Claude himself reluctantly did. We celebrate Claude's success and feel the pain when he stumbles. After reading My Brother's Madness, you will not soon forget the beauty and the burden loving sometimes brings.

Don't let the title scare you." My Brother's Madness" by Paul Pines is a page turner. The story ricochets gracefully from past to present. This gives the insight into the pressures of growing up in an unstable environment. These jumps forward and backward are clear and easy to follow and add a level of suspense. This memoir is not your typical psychological thriller. It's a factual one! Told with a an elegant simplicity and a sustaining sense of humor, "My Brother's Madness" is a pleasure -- disturbing, yes, but a pleasure. Upon reaching the end, one feels the most astounding thing is not that one brother cracked up, but that the other somehow made it through. I couldn't recommend it more highly.

In a market saturated with memoirs, many of them static and self-indulgent, "My Brother's Madness" by Paul Pines shines like a bright star and reads like a fast-paced novel. Pines achieves this pacing by alternating scenes in Brooklyn (1950s-60s) where he and his brother Claude grew up, with scenes from his life in the present (1980s), where he and his wife are traveling to Paris and Rio, trying to negotiate movie rights to Paul's novel, increasingly distressed by Claude's deteriorating mental condition. The parallel scenes run consecutively, so you get a sense of the growing-up struggle between the brothers alongside the current struggle when Claude moves upstate where Paul is trying to start a family.

Among the book's many merits is the sad picture it paints of our country's fragmented mental health system. Claude is bounced from a huge, medieval institution downstate to halfway houses in Glens Falls and Hudson Falls. Everywhere, you see the bureaucratic red tape, the chaos, the underpaid staffs, the doctors, some of them well-meaning, most of them ineffective. When you've lost your mind, Claude laments near the end, there's nothing left to count on.

Another strong point of the book for me was the evocation of the 50s. If you lived through the time, wherever you were in this country, you'll remember the Lone Ranger and Tonto, the Brooklyn Dodgers, Eddie Fisher, and Vaughn Monroe's "Ghostriders in the Sky" (I hadn't heard that since the year they took the training wheels off my Schwinn). Even if you weren't a baby-boomer or a pre-baby boomer, there's enough rich detail to put you there near Ebbets Field and on the Lower East Side.

There are heroes in the book and one absolute villain, Betty, the stepmother who poisons the family dog and beats up on Paul and Claude's father when he's sick and bed-ridden. Even a good novelist would be hard-pressed to create a strangely wicked step-mother like this. Which is not to say the characters aren't complex and fully presented. The parents (the father a doctor, the mother a lawyer) are intelligent and creative and driven (unfortunately in opposite directions). Their marriage fragments, setting up Paul's rebellious stage (he skips school most days, steals a car, solves an equation put to him by a bullying math teacher thusly: "X equals fuck you.") and his brother's descent into paranoia and much worse.

Paul recounts his own life, so interesting and varied, it is almost a novel in itself. And he's the most complex character of all, driven by love and guilt, realizing that while he has helped his brother, he has also betrayed him. Is there an assassin in the caretaker, he wonders later in the book? Maybe, but I think it's the caretaker who triumphs.

There's a marvelously ambiguous moment of redemption near the end where Paul asks his dying brother, do I get another chance? Do I? replies Claude, meaning, among other things, that he gives his blessing to this memoir, their story, which makes heroes out of them, heroes of the inner struggle. What really drives this book is the author's love and faith in humanity. And the growth of those two things constitute the "inside story" of the book.

And if those ain't enough, the memoir itself is a back-up, since it both suggests and exemplifies the healing power of art.

For more than twenty years I have shouldered the responsibility of caring for a younger brother who is afflicted by crippling depression and sometimes delusions. Indeed, caring for him has been a burden on my entire family and frankly a source of personal anger and also shame. From time to time I have sought counsel about our family tragedy, but kind words have not provided much relief. Recently a friend suggested that I read Paul Pines' new book, My Brother's Madness. I stayed up through the night poring through the pages. It is impossible to put this book down, or it was for me. Pines writes at the pace of a gripping thriller and yet his subject is human and wrenching. Anyone would like this book, but for someone like myself, who has lived with mental illness, the book is an indispensable source of wisdom. He's written a great book.

Steve S. New Jersey

Paul Pines has written a painful, wonderful, engaging and frightening book.

A glacially slow beginning almost put me off, so much detail about the formative years in the big city so long ago I wouldn't have kept going if a colleague hadn't encouraged me.

Others have written about his bravery and truth and compassion for being the caregiver to a mentally ill family member while trying to live your own life. All of that is true, and wonderful, but there are other parts of the book just as marvelous:

Pines, in his courtship of his wife, Carol, could teach romance writers how to write a real love scene. When he describes how Carol's singing made his life complete again it felt just right.

His descriptions of Glens Falls (where I live) give this little town the character earthiness and charm of Chicago somehow combined with Bedford Falls.

His charting how his life had to keep going even while his brother's unraveled, his love/hate relationship with the responsibility of family, were straightforward and understandable.

I am proud to say that I am a friendly acquaintance of Carol and Paul, especially as this book lays bare things that must have been difficult to say.

As the story in this book begins, what starts out as an apparent average family living an average life; a father the mother and two children, but then, all of a sudden the mom flies the coop and things go south, quickly and down the rabbit hole we go. You won't learn enough background on the main characters for my taste, but the focus of course is on the Author's life and his heroic odyssey with his defiled brother. Furthermore, one could argue that Claude internalized his parents legacy while Paulie externalized it, and that their talent and intelligence keep their boat afloat and keep them from becoming statistics. So if your interested in Memoirs with extra-good flair, honest tortured-passion, leaves you wanting-more, then we should be in agreement, reading this book is a no-brainier. As far as the way I'm wired, this book not only read me, but got in my head like an extra lobe, lingered, then finally melted away forever to be stored in my personal abyss. In conclusion, sometimes you just have to let the story talk for itself Marty Cohen (maricon).

Paul Pines gives a masterful account of he and his bother's life and trying to coupe with mental illness. This book is a must read for everyone.