How Can We Both Love and Survive Our Parents? - A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of my Mother and Schizophrenia by Claire Phillips
Claire Phillips’ deeply moving and devastating memoir ‘A Room with a Darker View’ openly confronts the subject of mental illness in such a way that the book stands out brightly alongside novels such as Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Bell Jar’ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. However, unlike Plath and Gilman’s examinations of their own experiences with such illnesses, in this occasion Phillips as the narrator acts as witness to her mother’s declining health. It is an account of mental illness through an outsider’s eye, the eye of a daughter watching her mother withdraw through a long battle with schizophrenia. It is a book that challenges the stigma surrounding mental health through a complete examination of a single persons decline.
The book covers a span of over thirty years of Phillips’ witness to her mother’s illness, she writes that at the young age of two and a half she began to recognize something wrong. Her mother, an Oxford trained lawyer had an illness throughout her life that went vastly unrecognized by both her father, a world class doctor, and her husband, a highly acclaimed astrophysicist. Phillips’ confessional writing encloses not only the difficulties of caring for a parent with a chronic illness, but also reflects upon feminist topics throughout the 20th and into the 21st Century as her mother’s struggle to maintain a professional life even as a high-powered lawyer remained prominent in the duration of her simultaneous struggle with schizophrenia.
Told in short fragments, flashbacks, and memories, the memoir brings the reader into the world of Phillips’ transatlantic childhood. Born in New Jersey, and then moved to Oxford, England, Phillips’ own childhood was fragmented by culture shocks and of course, the realization of her mother’s illness. The split and broken writing style of the book reflects the inconsistency of her mother’s mind and mental health. The chapters detail each family members work towards the care of Phillip’s mother, including Phillips’ younger brother who often had to result to calling 911 to protect his mother. Throughout the book, Phillips openly writes of her mothers’ behavior and schizophrenic episodes in incredibly devastating passages that allows the reader to feel the frustration that Phillips’ herself felt while caring for her mother.
There are two main characters within this book, Claire Phillips and her mother. Two women facing an illness, one as spectator and the other as the patient. The relationship between the spectator and patient, between the two women of this book portrays the complexities of mother/daughter relationships as well as the complications of womanhood itself as Phillips tackles the process of growing up and growing away from our parents. How can we love yet leave our parents? How can we discover who we are as we move away from the people who raised us?
‘A Room With A Darker View’ serves both as a memoir of the chronicles of Claire Phillips’ witness to her mother’s struggle with Schizophrenia but also as a reflection of Phillips’ own life from childhood into adulthood. Phillips’ specifies her own world that she began to build around her mother’s illness as she moved from her childhood in England, to a home in New Jersey with her mother, onto living in California with her father - all just as she grew into adolescence. As the book continues, Phillips begins to write and travels to Zimbabwe to work as a journalist before publishing her first book. The world that is painted both around and outside of her mother’s illness portrays how we are able to survive our parents and grow into adult human beings, moving away from the people who raised us into becoming our very own person.
The descriptions in the book are detailed with both devastation and beauty. The narrative ranges from various images of Phillips' own wonder as a child, student, artist traveling the world, exploring who it is she wants to become to incredibly clinical explanations of her mother’s treatment, in and out of various hospitals and of course, her schizophrenic episodes. It is written that Phillips’ mother experienced manic laughter, morbid hallucinations and chronic delusions and panic. A common example is that of Phillips’ mother believing that she was becoming blind – an episode that continued for a long period of time. Another common theme throughout the book is the language of medication, Phillips’ mother was placed on many different medications at varying doses, thus providing an insight into the world of psychiatry and the extreme trial and error of modern medicine.
Standing at 266 pages, the book moves swiftly and spares no time for ambiguity. Often uncomfortable, the book is incredibly informative and to the point regarding its subject matter but still remains a beautiful and tragic examination of a woman gradually losing her mother. Claire Phillips so generously invites her readers into her world and shares her experience without any hesitation. She allows her reader to bond with her on the journey throughout the memoir and constantly details without overexplaining the stigma surrounding mental illness and how it must be confronted.
A Room With A Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia
Claire Phillips
266 pages, 2020
About Amelia Kennedy
Amelia Kennedy is a British born writer and actor based in Brooklyn, New York. She writes poetry and has had three short stories published in Literate Sunday. Amelia is currently working on her first novel entitled ‘Daughters of the Revolution’ - which will be completed this year. Her writing influences from feminist theories, punk music and Shakespeare sonnets. Find Amelia on Instagram @ameliakennedywritings
