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Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So
Mark Vonnegut
Random House
October 2010
On Sale: October 5, 2010
224 pages ISBN: 0385343795 EAN: 9780385343794 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
More than thirty years after the publication of his
acclaimed memoir The Eden Express, Mark Vonnegut continues
his remarkable story in this searingly funny, iconoclastic
account of coping with mental illness, finding his calling
as a pediatrician, and learning that willpower isn’t nearly
enough. Here is Mark’s childhood spent as the
son of a struggling writer in a house that eventually held
seven children after his aunt and uncle died and left four
orphans. And here is the world after Mark was released from
a mental hospital to find his family forever altered. At the
late age of twenty-eight—and after nineteen rejections—Mark
was accepted to Harvard Medical School, where he gained
purpose, a life, and some control over his condition.
The brilliantly evoked events of Mark Vonnegut’s life
are at once perfectly unique and achingly relatable. There
are the manic episodes, during which he felt burdened with
saving the world, juxtaposed against the real-world
responsibilities of running a pediatric practice. At times
he felt that his parents’ lives would improve if only they
had a few hundred more bucks in their bank account, while at
other points his father’s fame merely heightened
expectations that he be better, funnier (and crazier) than
the average person. Ultimately a tribute to the
small, daily, and positive parts of a life interrupted by
bipolar disorder, Just Like Someone Without Mental
Illness Only More So is a wise, unsentimental, and
inspiring book that will resonate with generations of readers.
No awards found for this book.
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