A Review of Deborah A. Lott’s Don’t Go Crazy Without Me

By Claire Donohue Roof

Deborah A. Lott’s Don’t Go Crazy Without Me: A Tragicomic Memoir is the story of a young woman’s coming of age and how she separates her own identity from her family’s. She recalls comedic and painful situations from her young childhood to teenage years.

Her story starts in 1968, in California, when Lott is sixteen and in the waiting room of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Her father is hospitalized and even though doctors haven’t pinpointed her father’s ill...