The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father's Struggle With Madness [Paperback]

Nathaniel Lachenmeyer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 14, 2001

The Outsider is an unsentimental yet profoundly moving look at one family’s experience with mental illness. In 1978, Charles Lachenmeyer was a happily married professor of sociology who lived in the New York suburbs with his wife and nine-year-old son, Nathaniel. But within a few short years, schizophrenia–a devastating mental illness with no known cure–would cost him everything: his sanity, his career, his family, even the roof over his head. Upon learning of his father’s death in 1995, Nathaniel set out to search for the truth behind his father’s haunted, solitary existence. Rich in imagery and poignant symbolism, The Outsider is a beautifully written memoir of a father’s struggle to survive with dignity, and a son’s struggle to know the father he lost to schizophrenia long before he finally lost him to death.

The Outsider is a recipient of the Kenneth Johnson Memorial Research Library Book Award and is the winner of the 2000 Bell of Hope Award, presented annually by the Mental Health Association of Philadelphia to honor “significant and far-reaching contributions benefiting those facing the challenge of mental illness.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Writing with compassion and candor, Lachenmeyer seeks to understand his father, Charles, a professor of sociology and a complex puzzle of a man who slowly lost his agonizing fight with schizophrenia and died in 1995. Drawing upon the older man's letters to explore his emotional demons, Lachenmeyer discloses that his father's condition deteriorated when Charles was dismissed from Hunter College in 1975 and his mother died later that same year. Although Charles remained optimistic that he could reverse his fortunes, even after losing several other teaching jobs in New York colleges in the 1970s and 1980s, his condition precipitated the loss of his home, marriage and child just two months short of his 38th birthday in 1981. Lachenmeyer admits to his own confusion and bitterness when confronted with Charles's odd behavior, which caused him to sever all ties between them in 1989, when the author was 20. In one letter to his embattled father he wrote: "I cannot live in your world; you cannot live in mine." Eventually, Charles became obsessed with an evil government conspiracy to enslave the world, working briefly as a part-time cab driver before living on the streets. Through interviews with family, friends, former colleagues and medical personnel, Lachenmeyer constructs a heartrending portrait of a man whose emotional illness eventually robbed him of everything, counterbalanced in part by the author's gradual understanding of the plight of homeless people, who are often the victims of madness and misfortune. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

It was only after his long-estranged father died that Lachenmeyer discovered he had been living on the streets. This book is a son's attempt to reconstruct his father's downward spiral from a promising career as a sociology professor to his death as a schizophrenic vagrant who had been in and out of mental hospitals and eluding Burlington, VT, police. First-time author Lachenmeyer wrestles with the guilt of having cut off communication with his father and with his fears about his own sanity. In a style reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, he wonderfully evokes the pathetic beauty of his father's attempts to retain his dignity and hope as he struggled with inner torments and the indifference of others. The book adds no new facts about schizophrenia or mental health policy and thus isn't a necessary purchase for small collections. But it is highly recommended for larger public and academic libraries.
-Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, WA
Copyright 2000 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: 288 pages
• Publisher: Broadway (August 14, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767901916
• ISBN-13: 978-0767901918
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.6 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #87,446 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Mind at Work, March 13, 2000

By 

Thad Davis (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father's Struggle with Madness (Hardcover)

At a time when far too many memoirs either wallow in psychobabble and sentimentality, or retreat to a smug and shallow irony, Nathaniel Lachenmeyer's The Outsider proves a welcome exception. Thoughtful and heartfelt, this book shows what is possible when one focuses one's intelligence on a subject that is both personal yet outside oneself. Lachenmeyer attempts to understand his father. Does he succeed? In many ways, yes. Does he learn something of himself? Certainly. But more importantly, as he takes an unflinching look at his father's schizophrenia, as he chronicles his father's delusions, Lachenmeyer is able to honor him. He offers a study of madness that is remarkable in its lucidity.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An unsentimental journey, March 14, 2000

By 

J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father's Struggle with Madness (Hardcover)

A son's attempt to come to understand the schizophrenic illness that struck his father when the son was a small boy. He had had little contact with him after that, but he came to know in later times his father's story, the downward spiral caused by his illness. What comes through, too, is the dignity with which his father attempted to cling to his humanity, even though he was tortured by a convoluted paranoid delusional system. Eventually the people in a Vermont town were able help him, ironically, by getting him convicted for panhandling, a move that got him off the streets, where his weight, at a height of 6'4", was 140 pounds, and where he was suffering frostbite during a bitter winter, and into a mental hospital where he was given medication that improved his condition and undoubtedly saved his life. The author writes about the pros and cons, then, of our society having criminalized mental illness; in this case the father's life was saved after he'd been arrested for a petty crime, determined to be not guilty by reason of insanity, and sent to a mental hospital where he got the care he needed. A riveting book.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Book, April 18, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father's Struggle with Madness (Hardcover)

Why aren't there more books like this? I heard about it on Fresh Air and have been surprised it hasn't been more widely reviewed. Does the Ny Times Book Review or the Washington Post or Newsweek or Time just not care about mental illness or Lachenmeyer's compelling story?

Anyway, I feel as if I have been searching for books like this my whole life. Both my mother and my sister suffer from schizophrenia and I have felt lost and alone. So many books seem to make fun of the illness, or to not really get it. By it I mean what it is like for the families of those who suffer.

Though this book is a wonderful first step, my own wish is personal. I wish for a book that really tells what it is like for family members who try to deal with a schizophrenic family member day in and day out. Lachenmeyer's book is a reconstruction. Lachenmeyer wa estranged from his father and journeys back to "find" his father posthumously. It's close, and compelling, but it doesn't adequately capture an experience that many of us must endure: daily care of a severly ailing family member. That said, this is a marvelous book and a tremendous first step to opening up a discussion of mental illness in this country.