Zig-zag boy A memoir of madness and motherhood

Essayist Frank's first book is a self-described "love story" with no romance. Rather, it reverberates with a mother's fierce love for her son as he battles psychosis. From the initial frightening moments of 19-year-old Zach's psychotic break, Frank intimately depicts her family's heart-wrenching experience, rendering the unimaginable with grace. Desperate to "fix" Zach, then advocate for him, Frank moves through her own reactions of love, resentment, grief, and anxiety, always tethered to her son's connection with reality. Years of Zach's fluctuating stability threaten to splinter Frank's relationships with her wife and older son as she ponders how much latitude is best for him. Is psychosis caused by genetics, brain chemistry, or trauma? Theories abound, but the more Frank learns, the more questions she and an often unsympathetic medical/psychiatric community have. Frank returns with Zach to their native England, where setbacks are compounded by the pandemic and lockdown. A recurring motif of elephant seals punctuates this crucial account, which will speak to other families caught between loved ones, mental illness, and society's judgment.

A mother chronicles how her youngest son's struggle with mental illness affected her understanding of what it meant to be a mother. When Frank found her 19-year-old son Zach "tracing the wires of our defunct telephone circuit board" in their home because he believed they were under surveillance by "bad people," she knew something was wrong. Until that moment, Zach had been a well-liked, highly intelligent teen who had never showed any predisposition to mental illness. The doctors who examined him eventually settled on a diagnosis of schizophrenia, while Frank scrambled to find her otherwise high-functioning son the help and medication he required. Unfortunately, it quickly became clear that the antipsychotics meant to control his condition made other parts of his life much harder. While Zach contended with the difficult side effects--e.g., blurry vision, muscle spasms, and decreased cognitive capability--Frank dealt with the "mental illness trauma" of witnessing her son's decline. When he went off medication, the author supported his decision, not knowing that Zach was at the beginning of a stop-start drug cycle that, like homelessness and hospitalization, would continue through his adult life. Desperate to "fix my boy," Frank did everything she possibly could to assist him, including moving back to their native England in hopes that his father and the British health care system could look after him better than the American system could. The author's efforts only made her realize that sacrificing for Zach put her relationship with her beloved American wife at risk of rupture. Eventually, she found a measure of solace in a support group. "We agree that we are all mad, all disordered, all traumatized," she writes, "and our loved ones are no different than anyone else." As she explores the sometimes-painful limits of mothering, Frank candidly discusses the wisdom of letting go what cannot be healed or made whole in exchange for the gift of acceptance. A heartfelt memoir about family, mental illness, and unconditional love. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.