People fall sick every day. Some more seriously than others. We have people suffering with chronic diseases like Arthiritis, and Diabetes by the hordes. Then there are more lethal diseases like different types of cancers and other immune system disorders. But there is one category that is often either overlooked or clubbed together as one – crazy. mentally unstable, moody – depending on the intensity, with the patient institutionalized or pushed into the attic. A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise is one such story from the eyes of a paranoid schizophrenic written by his niece Sandra Allen.
A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story About Schizophrenia
Sandra Allen received an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. A former BuzzFeed features editor, she also co-founded the online literary magazine Wag’s Revue.
Hardcover: 288 pages
Author: Sandra Allen
Publisher: Scribner (January 23, 2018)
ISBN: 1501134035, 978-1501134036
A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise Summary
Sandra Allen did not know her uncle Bob very well. As a child, she had been told he was “crazy,” that he had spent time in mental hospitals while growing up in Berkeley in the 60s and 70s. But Bob had lived a hermetic life in a remote part of California for longer than she had been alive, and what little she knew of him came from rare family reunions or odd, infrequent phone calls. Then in 2009 Bob mailed her his autobiography. Typewritten in all caps, a stream of error-riddled sentences over sixty, single-spaced pages, the often incomprehensible manuscript proclaimed to be a “true story” about being “labeled a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic,” and arrived with a plea to help him get his story out to the world.
In A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise, Allen translates her uncle’s autobiography, artfully creating a gripping coming-of-age story while sticking faithfully to the facts as he shared them. Lacing Bob’s narrative with chapters providing greater contextualization, Allen also shares background information about her family, the culturally explosive time and place of her uncle’s formative years, and the vitally important questions surrounding schizophrenia and mental healthcare in America more broadly. The result is a heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious portrait of a young man striving for stability in his life as well as his mind, and an utterly unique lens into an experience that, to most people, remains unimaginable.
A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise Reveiws
Here are what the critics and readers are saying about this new autobiography of a man suffering from Schizophrenia.
“A glimpse of how schizophrenia looks and feels from the inside.” ~ Kirkus Reviews
“Allen offers readers an incredible glimpse into the life of a person battling with schizophrenia.” ~ Publisher’s Weekly