Just finished a great book...

totoro

Mom? What's a difficult child?
They never really say Mental Illness, but the story really hits home on so many levels... I think it would for many of us on the board here... It doesn't get too much into Courtney's life. It is more about Linda's coming of age... a very touching story, written with honesty.
This is the excerpt from Amazon:

"Her Mother's Daughter"

By: Linda Carroll

A Memoir of the Mother I Never Knew and of My Daughter, Courtney Love


* Despite the suggestive subtitle, Carroll's memoir is far less tell-all than it is her personal recollections of growing up feeling alienated from her adoptive family, her peers, and her religion. Born with an inquisitive mind, Linda has trouble relating to her tightly wound adoptive mother, Louella, and her sexually abusive adoptive father, Jack. While her friendships with other girls are deep and stable, her relationships with men prove to be much more complicated. Carroll finds herself pregnant at 18 by a man she does not love, but she marries him and gives birth to a girl, Courtney. The marriage does not last, and Carroll spends the next decade in search of happiness, marrying twice again and going as far as New Zealand as her relationship with Courtney deteriorates. Years later, when Courtney is pregnant with her own child, Carroll finally seeks her own birth mother and is surprised to discover she is renowned writer Paula Fox. A thoughtful memoir of one woman's coming-of-age in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s.

Available @ http://www.amazon.com
 

Nancy

Well-Known Member
Thanks for the recommendation. Sounds like a book I would enjoy, I'll get it as soon as I'm finished with the one I'm reading. I'm listening to "Indentical Strangers" right now on audiotape, about two identical twins seperated at birth and adopted by seperate families as an experiment on nature vs nurture by the adoption agency. It's quite good.

Nancy
 

Star*

call 911........call 911
Is this the same Courtney Love that was married to Nirvana's Kirk Cobane? WOW - that explains a bunch if it is.

Too bad she didn't give mental health a plug though.

Thanks Toto
 

totoro

Mom? What's a difficult child?
She does try to get Courtney help, she takes her to psychiatrists and sends her away to a psychiatric, Hospital in the States... She travels all over to try and help her, she herself has issues... she becomes a therapists.
The Doctors all blame her parenting... and basically drug Courtney.
Yes it is Courtney Love... It is a very compelling story. From the whole adoption level to her trying to get Courtney help and herself help... to losing so much of her family and herself.

I just started "Crazy" A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness...

Suffering delusions from bipolar disorder, Mike Earley broke into a stranger's home to take a bubble bath and significantly damaged the premises. That Mike's act was viewed as a crime rather than a psychotic episode spurred his father, veteran journalist Pete Earley (Family of Spies), to investigate the "criminalization of the mentally ill." Earley gains access to the Miami-Dade County jail where guards admit that they routinely beat prisoners. He learns that Deidra Sanbourne, whose 1988 deinstitutionalization was a landmark civil rights case, died after being neglected in a boarding house. A public defender describes how he—not always happily—helps mentally ill clients avoid hospitalization. Throughout this grim work, Earley uneasily straddles the line between father and journalist. He compromises his objectivity when for most of his son's ordeal—Mike gets probation—he refuses to entertain the possibility that the terrified woman whose home Mike trashed also is a victim. And when, torn between opposing obligations, he decides not to reveal to a source's mother that her daughter has gone off her medications, he endangers the daughter's life and betrays her mother. Although this is mostly a sprawling retread of more significant work by psychologist Fuller Torrey and others, parents of the mentally ill should find solace and food for thought in its pages. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
 

Steely

Active Member
:reading:
I am a book junkie, and I just got 2 gift certificates to bookstores that I need to use. I will definitely be picking up "her mother's daughter".

Toto......you read amazing stuff on mental illness......you should start a CD book list :smile:
What other ones have you read?
I assume you have read both of Wally Lamb's books? My favs.......excellent writing and insight.
 

totoro

Mom? What's a difficult child?
Yes I loved his books!!!! They 2 of the first books I had read on Mental Illness. They moved me. Those are both books I would revisit.... I would love to make a list... I would love to hear others picks as well.
I just ordered
Temple Grandin's: Thinking in Pictures, Animals in Translation,
I also just finished
An Unquiet Mind
By: Kay Redfield Jamison

A must read for anyone who is involved with or who themselves has Mental Illness, All of her books should be in your library!!!

Touched with Fire
Exuberance
Night Falls Fast

I love reading!!!!
 
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