The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia

The debut of an important new literary voice: Marin Sardy's extraordinarily affecting, fiercely intelligent memoir unflinchingly traces the path of the schizophrenia that runs in her family.

Against the starkly beautiful backdrop of Anchorage, Alaska, where the author grew up, Marin Sardy weaves a fearless account of the shapeless thief—the schizophrenia—that kept her mother immersed in a world of private delusion and later manifested in her brother, ultimately claiming his life.

Composed of exquisite, self-contained chapters that take us through three generations of this adventurous, artistic, and often haunted family, The Edge of Every Day draws in topics from neuroscience and evolution to the mythology and art rock to shape its brilliant inquiry into how the mind works. In the process, Sardy casts new light on the treatment of the mentally ill in our society. Through it all runs her blazing compassion and relentless curiosity, as her meditations takes us to the very edge of love and loss—and invite us to look at what comes after.

• The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
• Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness
• Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father's Story of Love and Madness
• Surviving Schizophrenia, 7th Edition: A Family Manual
• The Scar: A Personal History of Depression and Recovery
• Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life
• The Sun Is a Compass: A 4,000-Mile Journey into the Alaskan Wilds
• Tyrannical Minds: Psychological Profiling, Narcissism, and Dictatorship
• A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past
• Little Panic: Dispatches from an Anxious Life