Relative Stranger: Piecing Together a Life Plagued by Madness

by Mary Loudon

Recalling Jeanette Walls's A Glass Castle, Relative Stranger is an emotionally honest, gripping memoir of one woman’s attempt to piece together a humane portrait of her dead sister and the struggle of mental illness. After learning that her older sister Catherine, who had vanished long ago, had been “inhabiting the identity” of a man called “Stevie,” Mary Loudon plunges into a kind of post-mortem investigation to understand who her sister was. Interviewing doctors, nurses, social services representatives, nuns, cafe owners, grocers and ministers, Loudon paints an explicit, clear account of how schizophrenia affected a promising young life while exploring the assumptions people make about mental illness. Relative Stranger stands as an honest and uncompromising challenge to the ways in which we think about one another and what it means to love, to lose, to die and above all to belong.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Mental Health, Autobiography

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Mary Loudon is the prize-winning author of four non-fiction books, published to great acclaim around the world. She has also contributed essays and poetry to six anthologies. My House Is Falling Down is her first novel.

Mary has won four writer’s prizes, as well as being short-listed for MIND Book of the Year and long-listed for Richard & Judy Book of The Year. An experienced public speaker and broadcaster, she has made over 200 radio and TV appearances. She is a Fellow of the British-American Project and has been a judge for the Whitbread Prize and Costa Book Awards.

She is a popular public speaker and broadcaster, and has made numerous radio and television appearances.

Mary was born in November 1966 and lives with her family in Wantage and mid-Wales.

www.maryloudon.com

Reviews

[Lasuggeritrice]

L'immaginazione può dare emancipazione e liberazione là dove la vita non può. Ma che cosa succede quando la mente è il luogo dal quale si vuole essere liberati?