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

(Paperback)

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'Unsurprisingly, feminists have been at the forefront of writing illness narratives, from Virginia Woolf to Audre Lord and Susan Sontag. My family's inability to accommodate my mother's illness, the perniciousness of her particular subtype of schizophrenia, paranoia, and the story of women's fight for gender equality in both the workplace and at home are part of this chronicle.'

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 senseless laughter, persistent delusions, and florid hallucinations - went unrecognized for decades by both her husband, a world-class British astrophysicist, and her father, a Jewish-Zimbabwean doctor knighted by Pope Paul VI.

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 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.

Reviews

As heroic as it is original, Claire Phillips writing always finds the scary corners that would be secret to any other author, from which inevitably there comes into vision a revelatory perspective. Reading A Room With a Darker View, you wont shake it from your mind; finishing it, you wont shake it from your memory.
Steve Erickson, author of Shadowbahn and Zeroville
Short, distilled chapters of quietly tantalizing prose grip us throughout the span of Claire Phillips fully realized and haunting story of her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer with a mental illness difficult to treat and to diagnose.
Bruce Baumann, author of And the Word Was and Broken Sleep
An engrossing story of identity formation, Phillips ultimately gives us not a confessional memoir but a parable of agency and resilience amid uncertain reality. As a speculative fiction writer whose work is rooted in an encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction, she crafts a tale of time travel, one where past-present-futures collapse into braided familial, personal, and social histories. Throughout the book Phillips illuminates the fierce reality of her mother's delusions as well as the tools she gives her daughter to survive her.
Connie Samaras
An inventively told and wholly original memoir.
David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
A moving portrait of her mother and their relationship, A Room with a Darker View is a book that people who are going through something similar need to read. Mental illness is a story, like everyones life is a story.... Many people dont want to talk about death or illness, they want to talk about the heroics. But I think some of the heroics are just telling these stories. In this book, Phillips mother has a full life.
Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of a Turning World
A Room with a Darker View openly confronts the subject of mental illness in such a way that the book stands out brightly alongside novels such as Sylvia Plaths The Bell Jar and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper. [...] The book is incredibly informative and to the point regarding its subject matter but still remains a beautiful and tragic examination of a woman gradually losing her mother. Claire Phillips generously invites her readers into her world and shares her experience without any hesitation.
Amelia Kennedy, Write or Die Tribe
Through research into her mothers schizophrenia, and vignettes depicting the hoops of the American health-care system their family had to jump through in order to treat it, Phillips illustrates that, as a society, we still have a long way to go in order to better understand and help those with mental illnesses, and to assist their families in getting their loved ones the critical care they need.
Los Angeles Review of Books

Author Bio

Claire Phillips is the author of the memoir A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia (DoppelHouse) and the novella Black Market Babies (11th Hour Press). She is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets prize and a Pushcart Prize notable. Her writing has appeared in Black Clock magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy, Joyland, Los Angeles Review of Books, Motherboard-Vice, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among other places. She teaches writing at CalArts, SCI-Arc, and U.C. Irvine, and is Director of the Los Angeles Writers Reading Series at Glendale College. She holds a M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University and a B.A. in English from San Francisco State University.