And Now I Spill the Family Secrets : An Illustrated Memoir

Resumen del libro

A beautifully illustrated black-and-white memoir that empathetically explores a family's history with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and one woman's quest to find healing.

Margaret Kimball's visceral graphic memoir explores the state and stages of a woman's life, including motherhood, marriage, divorce, and mental health. And Now I Spill the Family Secrets begins when she learns of her mother's suicide attempt thirty years earlier, on Mother's Day of 1988 when Margaret was four years old. Desperate to know what drove her mother's desire to end her life, Margaret embarks on an immersive journey into the past, to uncover the secrets her family has kept for decades.

Poring over the documentation of her family's life including old diary entries, medical records, letters, and even home videos Margaret pieces together a narrative map to understand what no one likes to talk about: the origins of fractures in a family. And Now I Spill the Family Secrets reveals painful truths about her childhood, her mother's struggles, her grandmother's institutionalization, and her brother's increasingly troubling paranoia and delusions.

Both a coming-of-age story about family dysfunction and a meditation on the challenges of mental illness, And Now I Spill the Family Secrets is raw, funny, poignant, and deeply inspiring in its portrayal of the truths that drive a family apart and bring them back together.

And Now I Spill the Family Secrets features 230 black-and-white illustrations.