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

The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father's Struggle With Madness (Paperback)

~ (Author) "I still remember the shock I felt the first time I saw the transient..." (more)
Key Phrases: panhandling charge, status hearing, delusional system, Church Street, New Hampshire, Christian Science (more...)
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)

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Frequently Bought Together

The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father's Struggle With Madness + Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (Modern Library) + An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
Price For All Three: $32.98

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  • This item: The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father's Struggle With Madness by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer

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  • Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (Modern Library) by William Styron

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  • An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison

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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.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Broadway (August 14, 2001)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0767901916
  • ISBN-13: 978-0767901918
  • Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #353,713 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
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31 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.8 out of 5 stars (31 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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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
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.
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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
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
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.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Book, April 18, 2000
By A Customer
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.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A Warm Account of A Father
Nathaniel Lachenmeyer's account of his father, Charles, was a warmly written personal account of a man's rapid deterioration from a brilliant, young sociologist to a homeless... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Richard Schlosberg

4.0 out of 5 stars A Man Seeks to Find Out More About His Schizophrenic Father
I would have given this book a '5' except that the writing was not up to the content.

This book is about an adult man who seeks out the history of his schizophrenic... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Bonnie Brody

5.0 out of 5 stars Lachenmeyer helped my relationship with my father
As a trained mental health professional, I wanted to read the book for purely academic and research reasons. Read more
Published 18 months ago by D. M. Foster

5.0 out of 5 stars Lesson #1 for the programmed masses
Unfortunately, most readers of this book, as well as the author of the book, even if he is his son, are misinformed. Read more
Published on February 17, 2007 by Ghost

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book Everyone Should Read
I truly believe this book should be read by everyone, not just people that are going into the mental health field. Read more
Published on November 1, 2005 by thomasme

5.0 out of 5 stars Heartbreaking and poignant
THE OUTSIDER brought the pain and the struggles of Charles Lachenmeyer to life. Charles was a brillant sociology professor who gradually was transformed into a victim of paranoid... Read more
Published on August 20, 2005 by ShirleyH

4.0 out of 5 stars The Outsider
I found the Outsider to be a fascinating book, one that really opened my eyes to the problems encountered by those suffereing from mental illness and schizophrenia. Read more
Published on August 2, 2005 by J. Gamble

5.0 out of 5 stars Should be a movie
How many times have we looked at homeless people on the street and wondered how they got there? I've thought about it many times, because my own father was homeless when he died... Read more
Published on November 15, 2004 by Magz

5.0 out of 5 stars courage and strength
I found this book to be very well written and admired the courage and strength of its subject as well as the courage of the author. Read more
Published on January 27, 2004

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Well Done
This book, the story of the author's father, a brilliant man who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and died under tragic conditions, moved me to tears. Read more
Published on December 8, 2003

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