This novella is the female equivalent to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (which | also enjoyed), except that this is a memoir and that was fiction. I am sure there is both truth and fiction in both versions though.
This book covers so much philosophical ground relating to our perceptions and understanding of sanity vs insanity, what is deemed normal for women vs normal for men, how we think about the brain, and the lack of communication between those who study the brain and those who study the mind. It also raises important questions about social norms and how this affects people (especially kids) whose particular personalities or ways do not fit in with the ideas of how things should be.
In many ways we have come very far, and in other ways we still have so far to go. A novella such as this, set in the late 1960's but recounted 25 odd years later, shed some light on this even as it is being read by someone who was an adolescent in the 1990's and is reading it in 2023. Will this have less of an impact if you have never been diagnosed with a mental disorder of wondered whether you were crazy? I don't know. Are there any such people? I have never met them... In my experience, almost everyone has had some way that they did not fit in with the world around them, and the only difference was how much of themselves they had to break or give up - or if they were even able to do so - in order to appear normal, or have a lifestyle that was acceptable.
If you like pondering some of our most persistent questions about being human and the societies we create while we force labels on everything, then you may find this book quite profound. It provides no answers, but it does shed some doubt on some of the answers we thought we had. And this doubt is important if we allow for the necessity to form a more inclusive society, one that does not INTERRUPT the being of those who are different and those who don't quite fit our idea of what the world should look like. Because those people are more than we think and looking at the amount of kids that are anxious and overwhelmed and depressed these days, this shift in thinking may very well be the most important thing we need to do.
This book gets a whole 5 stars because it will stay with me for quite some time, and I think I will be rereading it often.
