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Searching for His Sister

© Robert Powers

Schizophrenia seems to be the mental illness getting the most literary attention these days. Last year, Jay Neugeboren published Imagining Robert, his wrenching account of two brothers, one of whom was a successful writer, the other a victim of chronic mental illness. A few months ago, Wally Lamb's brilliant novel, I Know This Much Is True, hit the bestseller lists with its riveting 900-page account of twin brothers, one ravaged by schizophrenia, the other by guilt at being the lucky one.

Now comes another book dealing with siblings and schizophrenia: Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness (Noonday Press, $24.95). A troubling, disturbing book that is as much about its author Robin Hemley as it is about his older half-sister Nola, the text presents an anguished story of death, denial, and the troubling relationship between brilliant mother and talented son. At the edges throughout is the figure of Hemley's father, Cecil, whose death at age 53 seemed to ignite the dry leaves of family disaster.

In writing this book, Hemley confesses, repents, explains and analyzes his relationship with his father, who died when Robin was seven, along with his troubled sister who may have committed suicide when she was only 25 after a long struggle with the havoc of schizophrenia, an illness that destroys more than its principal victims. Nola is a book that takes risks, assembles its narrative with snippets of Nola's autobiography, complete with notated editing by her mother, attacks the stories told in the family about life and its fixations. Hemley at turns seems unnecessarily judgmental, at times vindictive and conniving against his mother, the noted writer Elaine Gottleib.

Robin Hemley, author of several successful books including the groundbreaking Turning Life Into Fiction, doesn't spare himself in this compelling yet depressing tale of a family gone wrong. The spectre of brain disorder plays a constant tune throughout, although strangely the supposed topic of the book is the least defined character in these 336 pages. Hemley includes large sections of her autobiography and he reports in detail the ravages of her decline, based on the stories from his mother and the manuscript she left behind. In his defense, Robin was in his early teens when Nola died, reportedly because of an accidental prescribed overdose of the tranquilizer Thorazine.

Hemley comes to suspect that his mother has participated in a cover-up, that Nola actually killed herself. At times Nola turns into a plodding detective story as the author assembles clues that would answer his perilous question.

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