Mira Bartok - The Memory Palace

Praise for

The Memory Palace

Mira Bartks memoir will haunt you with its compassion for people who have mental illness and for the tender vulnerability of their children. Bartks writing is at times spare and at times lyrical as she struggles in the unpredictable and unsafe world of being the child of a paranoid schizophrenic. How heavy is a dresser when youre the only one pushing it against the door? she asks, distilling years of nights of fear. Beautifully written, touchingly told, The Memory Palace lingers, radiating with pain and fear, love and freedom.

JANINE LATUS, author of If I Am Missing or Dead: A Sisters Story of Love, Murder and Liberation

The Memory Palace is a stunning meditation on the tenacity of familial bonds, even in the face of extreme adversity, and an artists struggle to claim her own creative life. Bartk carries us, room to luminous room, through her memory palace, filling it with stories that link loss to grace, guilt to love, the natural worlds great beauty to the creative act, and tragic beginnings to quietly triumphant closings. This extraordinary book, with its beautiful illuminated images, will stay with me.

MEREDITH HALL, author of Without a Map

Schizophrenia is more than a thief of the mind and Mira Bartk gives us the layered understanding to see the illness for all its cruel manifestations when the illness hijacks her mother. The best memoirs illuminate us all, and The Memory Palace left me illuminated with Bartks courage and unwavering belief in artistic expression in the midst of a shattered family. The writing is spectacular.

JACQUELINE SHEEHAN, PH.D. New York Times bestselling author of Lost & Found, and Now & Then

In The Memory Palace, Bartks gilded prose and encyclopedic mind lead the reader through her lifes darkest chambers where debilitating mental illness sends the authors mother spiraling from a promising career as a concert pianist to years of madness. But Bartk does not merely decorate her palace with humanistic portraits of the mentally ill and the seemingly insurmountable challenges they and their families face. She takes the reader up secret staircases illuminated by her own irrepressible creativity and struggle to survive, her mothers flashpoints of lucidity, and their equally ravishing intellects. From this great height Bartk shows us that arts healing powers affect even those that illness has pushed to the shadowiest extremes of the human experience. The Memory Palace is a grand, unforgettable estate.

ELYSSA EAST, author of Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town

A disturbing, mesmerizing personal narrative about growing up with a brilliant but schizophrenic mother.... Richly textured, compassionate and heartbreaking.

KIRKUS REVIEWS, starred review

Neither sensational nor cagily sentimental nor self pitying, this grounded, exquisitely written work... requires reading.

LIBRARY JOURNAL

All youd need is to see my copy to know-I have Post-it notes marking phrases and sentences I wanted to repeat because they were so good. About one-third of the way through, I thought that if this book were a person, Id consider making out with it.

LIBRARY JOURNAL BOOK SMACK!, starred review

Bartk juggles a handful of profound themes: how to undertake a creative
life how we remember how one says goodbye to a loved one in a manner that might redeem in some small way a life and a relationship blighted by psychosis; and, most vividly and harrowingly, how our society and institutions throw mental illness back in the hands of family members, who are frequently helpless to deal with the magnitude of the terrifying problems it generates. On all counts, its an engrossing read.

ELLE magazine

Nearly all the names of those who appear in this book have remained intact. However, I have changed the names of a couple people so as to protect their privacy. I have also reconstructed various conversations and condensed certain moments from my life.

This is a book about memory itself as much as it is a book about my relationship with my mother and I have tried my best to follow my own memorys capricious and meandering path along the way. As for my mothers diary entries between each chapterthey are her words but my headings.

Free Press
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1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com.

Copyright 2011 by Mira Bartk

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions
thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary
Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Free Press hardcover edition January 2011

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Illustrations by Mira Bartk

Art photography by Adam Laipson

Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bartk, Mira.

The memory palace / by Mira Bartk.

p. cm.

1. Herr, Norma Kurap, 19262007. 2. Bartk, Mira. 3. Children of the mentally ill
United StatesBiography. 4. Mentally ill parentsUnited StatesBiography.
I. Herr, Norma Kurap, 19262007. II. Title.
RC464.H47 2011
362.2085092dc22
[B 2010008399
ISBN 978-1-4391-8331-1
ISBN 978-1-4391-8333-5 (ebook)

For my mother

Norma Kurap Herr
November 17, 1926 January 6, 2007

And dedicated to the women
of the Community Womens Shelter
of Cleveland, Ohio

Child, knowledge is a treasury and your heart its strongbox.

Hugo of St. Victor, from The Three Best Memory Aids
for Learning History

A homeless woman, lets call her my mother for now, or yours, sits on a window ledge in late afternoon in a working-class neighborhood in Cleveland, or it could be Baltimore or Detroit. She is five stories up, and below the ambulance is waiting, red lights flashing in the rain. The woman thinks theyre the red eyes of a leopard from her dream last night. The voices below tell her not to jump, but the ones in her head are winning. In her story there are leopards on every corner, men with wild teeth and cat bodies, tails as long as rivers. If she opens her arms into wings she must cross a bridge of fire, battle four horses and riders. I am a swan, a spindle, a falcon, a bear. The men below call up to save her, cast their nets to lure her down, but she knows she cannot reach the garden without the distant journey. She opens her arms to enter the land of birds and fire. I will become wind, bone, blood, and memory. And the red eyes below are amazed to see just how perilously she balances on the ledgelike a leaf or a delicate lock of hair.