100 books like The Lives They Left Behind

This is the Horatio Alger story for talented young women who develop schizophrenia. Elyn Saks, a law professor at USC, tells a story of descent into a kind of madness that has a truly happy ending. Not the kind of happy ending literary novels offer us, in which contentment is laced with sadness. Elyn conquers her demons like a superhero.

I found myself returning to the resonant images again and again. The book presents pictures of a young man’s mother throughout her life before her mental illness, and with it, and includes some bits of narrative, letters from her and from his father.

These exerpts allowed me to construct the story of a family’s tragedy, the evolution of a beautiful young woman into someone else, someone who was still, nevertheless, painfully loved. One of the typewritten paragraphs begins, “Right after you were born, your mother believed she had fallen in love with someone else.”

I felt the young photographer’s mission to understand and hold his love for his imperfect parents driving the book. It was not put together for me, the reader, but out of a driving necessity. We are nevertheless allowed to witness the young man’s struggle and evolution.

Oliver Sack’s forward to this book, which was first published as The Lost Virtues of the Asylum, stopped me cold when I first read it. It was a revelation and started my mind turning. I read the piece dozens of times and then found the source materials Sacks quoted from and read those books, too.

I came of age during the era of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and it was a long unwinding to begin to consider that an institution, a state institution on the order of a large mental health hospital, could do good. But I’d grown up with a mentally ill parent who struggled to survive and bring me up safely. I saw firsthand the toll our life took on her. I began to tamper with my assumption that she’d been better off in the harrying world.

The photographs by Alexander Payne are haunting.… show more.

This is a book in which I have underlines on almost every page. It’s the story of the development of Psychiatry — the whole field — in the United States; in this case, there really is a story. One man, Thomas Kirkbride, the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, largely determined the course of how we first thought about and treated mental illness in America. His vision became the template for the large state institutions erected according to his model.

Steeped in the ideals of the European protocol of “moral treatment,” Kirkbride believed to the end that mental illness could be cured with nature, safe containment, music, art, reading, good food, and a slowed-down, kinder life. 

Nellie Bly was one of the great muckraking reporters in American history. She pretends to be insane and is admitted to the “mad house.” Along the way, she exposes the horrible treatment of those suffering from mental illness, but of her treatment in a boarding home, where spoiled beef was served.

Many at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Roosevelt Island suffered no mental illness; they simply didn’t know how to speak English, she wrote. “I left the insane ward with pleasure and regret—pleasure that I was once more able to enjoy the free breath of heaven; regret that I could not have brought with me some of the unfortunate women who lived and suffered with me, and who, I am convinced, are just as sane as I was and am now myself.”

Her reporting led to a grand jury investigation and reforms inside the asylum.

Welcome to the sweet romance of Isa, a dancer, and Alex, a baseball player, teenagers in New York with very different upbringings. Isa is a blonde, half-Cuban/half white, private school girl from a well-off family that’s falling apart behind the scenes. Alex is Dominican, attends public school, and divides his time between his divorced parents. He’s also a secret poet and leaves his poems for Isa to find on the subway train where they first met. Both have professional sports potential, but the reality is more complicated. The couple navigates challenges with their families and neighborhoods, including mental health and gangs, and you’ll be rooting for them the entire time. The author has a beautiful poem in the Rhyme and Rhythm anthology that I mentioned above.

This is another novel written expressly for teenagers, and all the better for it.

Inflected by the author’s own autobiographical experiences—like Craig, the novel’s narrator, Vizzini spent a week in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager—It’s Kind of a Funny Story was the first work of fiction I’d read that articulated the adolescent experience through the language of mental health. It was here that I learned “depression” isn’t an abstracted emotion but the very real neurochemical imbalance that impels Craig to call the suicide hotline after abandoning his SSRIs.

There’s an uncanny familiarity to the circumstances of Craig’s breakdown—namely in how he struggles to remain above water at a famously rigorous college preparatory high school—and a fundamental earnestness to his story’s confessions that gilds even its grimmest moments with a fifteen-year-old's sense of impressionable wonder.

I attended an author event at the coolest bookstore in Tampa in The Exchange building, and Lisa Unger was being interviewed by Colette Bancroft, the book editor for the Tampa Times.

Well, the book sounded wonderful, and it really is. The heroine in this story is smart, clever, and managed to keep one step ahead of the unusual, troubled boy she is hired to babysit. I loved this story and now have a signed copy on my keeper shelf.

The Risk Pool shows the importance of accepting and loving our fathers for who they are instead of resenting them for who they never could be. Sam Hall, the irresponsible wreck of a dad in this warm-hearted and funny book, is by any definition a terrible father, yet his relationship with his son Ned feels real in ways that most fictionalized father-son relationships don’t. Forced to care for Ned when Ned’s mother is hospitalized with mental illness, Sam introduces his son to pool halls, bars, bookies, drunks, and the occasional petty crime. Though aware of his father’s many faults, Ned can’t help but be charmed by Sam’s easy-going life, and even when Sam disappears for years, the bond remains strong.  

I rarely encounter writing that deals so unflinchingly with the darkest aspects of human nature in such a beautifully nuanced way. This book does not shy away from heavy, even transgressive themes, including mental illness, parental negligence, sexual predation, and grooming.

It centers around teenage sisters Edie and Mae, who are sent to stay with their estranged father after their mother’s failed suicide attempt—but their close alliance fractures due to their separate fixations on each parent. Told from multiple POVs, I found the novel’s structure as intricately woven as a spider’s web. The final act, which leaps ahead fifteen years, is an absolute stunner.