Oh how I love a book that can speak unhysterically about the hysterical awfulness of living with a severe mental illness. Em and the Big Hoom (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is a son’s story of his manic depressive mother and his family’s life with her. Through conversations with his mother, Em, about how she met his father and the course of her mental illness, we see the toll that Em’s illness has taken on her and on her family. Hat tip to Shannon for the recommendation!
Though the book is occasionally disorganized, as Pinto jumps around in time from his childhood to his adulthood to his teen years and back again, what shines is the dialogue, which conveys everything about its characters. Here’s Em:
“What’s Oedipal?”
Em loved a good story. She was off.
“Ick,” I said when Oedipus wandered off, his eyes bleeding and his future uncertain, escorted by his daughter who was also his sister.
“Well you may say ‘Ick’,” said Em. “But that’s what Freud says every boy wants to do to his mother. Ick, I say to Mr. Freud. He must have been odd, even for an Austrian. Not that I’m racist, but why would they have a navy when they’re landlocked?”
“Mr. Freud was in the navy?” I asked, confused.
“No, silly, I’m talking about The Sound of Music.“
These conversations, dashing back and forth between topics, form the spine of the book. But Pinto is also superb when talking about the highs and lows of bipolar disorder, which Em has. Sometimes his narrator wonders if Em is putting on the manic phase a bit, emphasizing her craziness for dramatic effect. But he never wonders about the authenticity of her sadness, which sucks her down and takes over everything.
I really liked this book and recommend it highly. Pinto conveys the toll mental illness takes on the family as they deal with it: both the emotional difficulty of living with someone who at any moment might lash out viciously at you, or attempt to take her own life, and the paralyzing fear the child of a woman with bipolar disorder has that he will develop the same illness.
Other bits I liked:
“But window-shopping was tourism once upon a time. You never thought you would take any of that stuff home. You didn’t think it would belong to you. Like the Taj Mahal. You went to look at it and then you got a good shot of it running in your veins. You now had some beauty under your eyelids.”
“What control do mad people have? I don’t know myself. I only know there is some control. Some things you can choose not to say. Some things you can choose not to do. It’s such a mess, that’s why it’s madness. Because even when you say things which are not in your control, you’re saying them because not saying them will mean having to say other things. So you say, ‘I’ll let this one out of its cage and that should make the other cage stronger.'”
Cover report: American by a lot. Though I admit I may be swayed by the attractiveness of the American book. It’s got French flaps, which always feel enormously decadent, and deckle-edge paper, and an odd trim size. I love an unusual trim size!
