A game of two halves

One of the one-star reviews on Goodreads asks “Where were the editors?”. Where indeed. Rarely have I read a book with such a poor first half followed by an increasingly good second half. Yes, many books get better as they go on, but this is too stark, and I can see why many people do not finish the book.

In the first half, Mark recounts his life post-graduation from a liberal arts college, post receiving an inheritance, post the career of his famous-writer father going stratospheric, in which he and his girlfriend decide to ‘drop-out’ and set up a self-sufficient hippy community in British Columbia. However, readers will realise that Mark is a phoney. He hangs around with college drop-outs and uses the phrase a lot, but he and his girlfriend were careful to graduate before their experiment. Similarly, he lets people assume he takes drugs like LSD when in fact he doesn’t (which is a good thing). He also has the financial resources to cover the fact that they never really become self-sufficient. Sadly, he also expresses sympathy for mass murderer Charles Manson. By this stage it is clear that he lacks self-awareness to a huge degree, and is unaware that he is a privileged, entitled, white, upper-middle class, whiney brat who never takes responsibility for his actions or give thanks for his lucky position in society.

In the (much better) second half of the book he becomes mentally ill. His writing here becomes increasingly moving as fear sets in and about something over which he feels he has no control. I had some doubts about the diagnosis he received at the time, and he addresses those same doubts in a post-script at the end.

Why the editors did not try and balance the book better, is beyond me. There are now many books on the lived experience of mental illness that are far better and more useful than this one, but as one of the earliest examples of the type I feel it remains a useful historical comment on the understanding of mental health in the times the 1970’s.

The narration is superb btw.

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