A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia

A Room with a Darker View is an unflinching, feminist work that chronicles the author’s troubled relationship with her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer, whose severe illness — marked by manic bouts of laughter, delusions, and florid hallucinations — went unrecognized for decades. Told in fragments, flashbacks, and chronicling the most extreme but unfortunately common aspects of schizophrenia, this elegantly written memoir is a reflection on illness, shame, and the generation gaps that have defined mother-daughter relationships amid the evolution of feminism in the 20th century. Like Porochista Khakpour’s lauded memoir, Sick (2018), A Room with a Darker View is not a linear tale of redemption or restitution. Rather, it challenges conceptions about mental illness, difficulties caring for an aging parent with a chronic disease, and how we frame contributions by outliers to society, while offering a scathing look at a broken medical system, the unwillingness of an elite educated family to reckon with its secrets, and finally, the universally-understood difficulty of caring for an aging parent with a chronic illness.