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Spiegel and Grau
May 2011
On Sale: May 17, 2011
400 pages ISBN: 140006869X EAN: 9781400068692 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
First introduced to the world in her sons’ now-classic
memoirs—Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors and John
Elder Robison’s Look Me in the Eye—Margaret Robison now
tells her own haunting and lyrical story. A poet and teacher
by profession, Robison describes her Southern Gothic
childhood, her marriage to a handsome, brilliant man who
became a split-personality alcoholic and abusive husband,
the challenges she faced raising two children while having
psychotic breakdowns of her own, and her struggle to regain
her sanity. Robison grew up in southern Georgia, where the façade of
1950s propriety masked all sorts of demons, including
alcoholism, misogyny, repressed homosexuality, and suicide.
She met her husband, John Robison, in college, and together
they moved up north, where John embarked upon a successful
academic career and Margaret brought up the children and
worked on her art and poetry. Yet her husband’s alcoholism
and her collapse into psychosis, and the eventual
disintegration of their marriage, took a tremendous toll on
their family: Her older son, John Elder, moved out of the
house when he was a teenager, and her younger son, Chris
(who later renamed himself Augusten), never completed high
school. When Margaret met Dr. Rodolph Turcotte, the
therapist who was treating her husband, she felt understood
for the first time and quickly fell under his idiosyncratic
and, eventually, harmful influence. Robison writes movingly and honestly about her mental
illness, her shortcomings as a parent, her difficult
marriage, her traumatic relationship with Dr. Turcotte, and
her two now-famous children, Augusten Burroughs and John
Elder Robison, who have each written bestselling memoirs
about their family. She also writes inspiringly about her
hard-earned journey to sanity and clarity. An astonishing
and enduring story, The Long Journey Home is a remarkable
and ultimately uplifting account of a complicated, afflicted
twentieth-century family.
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