Bartók Mira - The memory palace

Praise for
The Memory Palace

In lyrically elegant prose, The Memory Palace explores not just relationships but the slippery nature of memory itself.

O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE

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

The Memory Palace is not so much a palace of memories as a complex web of bewitching verbal and visual images, memories, dreams, true stories and rambling excerpts from the authors mentally ill mothers notebooks. It is an extraordinary mix.

THE WASHINGTON POST

Bartks story overcame my memoir phobia with a page-turning plot, sophisticated writing and, as a bonus, vivid illustrations from the author. It does indeed deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as The Glass Castle and The Liars Club, and readers of those memoirs will find The Memory Palace richly rewarding.

BOOKPAGE

The ineffable functioning of memory and the brain itself is integral to Bartks complex story. She brilliantly teases out the emotional and physical fallout of her mothers brain, damaged by illness The fact that Bartk can convey how and why she still loves her mother is perhaps the books greatest triumph.

THE BOSTON GLOBE

This is a book so strong, so powerful, so richly and dangerously evocative that the pages seem to quiver almost imperceptivity, as if at any moment they might leap to life.

MORE magazine

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

KIRKUS, starred review

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

LIBRARY JOURNAL

Poignant, powerful, disturbing, and exceedingly well-written, this is an unforgettable memoir of loss and recovery, love and forgiveness.

BOOKLIST, starred review

like the cabinet of wonders that is a frequent motif here, Bartks memory palace contains some rare, distinctive, and genuinely imaginative treasures.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

The Memory Palace is almost a fairy tale: two little girls grow up under the spell of their mothers madness. But it really did happen, once upon a time, and Mira Bartk uses her considerable powers of recollection and compassion to understand her family and to present them to readers as complete, loved human beings. This is an extraordinary book.

AUDREY NIFFENEGGER, author of The Time Travelers Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry

A haunting, almost patchwork, narrative that lyrically chronicles a complex mother-daughter relationship.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review

In this often gorgeous and often disturbing memoir the palace Bartk builds in this book is as beautiful as it is full of devastating damage.

NEW YORK JOURNAL OF BOOKS

The intertwined voices of grief-stricken, articulate sanity and not-so-sane but often quite poetic illness make a duet both wonderful and terrible.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

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

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

All youd need is to see my copy to knowI 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

Some books you carry with you while youre reading themin your purse, your e-reader, whateverbut this is one you also carry along well after the last page, on a small mantel in your own memory palace Its an arresting, compassionate, and unforgettable memoir.

BUST magazine

A book of aching beauty and compassion, that circles around the essence of what it is to be alive.

NICK FLYNN, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir

Among the plethora of books now available by the children of parents with schizophrenia, The Memory Palace stands out. Elegantly written, the book details what it is like to grow up with a mother with schizophrenia and sensitively assesses the long-term effects her mothers illness had on both her and her sister. Strongly recommended.

E. FULLER TORREY, M.D., author of The Insanity Offense

Mira Bartks harrowing and beautiful tale of growing up with her paranoid schizophrenic mother is in some ways a memoir about memory itself. For Bartksuffering from a brain injury and raised by someone who had tenuous contact with the external worldthe question what really happened takes on a particular urgency. She answers it with painstaking honesty, weaving deft parallels between domestic and institutional abuse, individual and national trauma. And as she recalls the shattering experiences of her childhood, literally illuminating them with her haunting mnemonic paintings, something that was never intact is made resonantly whole again.