Praise

Praise for The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók

“A heartbreaking, exquisitely told story of a daughter’s struggle to find beauty and order in the distorted, chaotic world created by her mother’s delusions.” —Jeannette Walls, bestselling author of The Glass Castle and Half Broke Horses

“…Bartok’s memory palace contains some rare, distinctive and genuinely imaginative treasures.” —Melanie Thernstrom, The New York Times Book Review

“On all accounts…an engrossing read.” —Ben Dickinson, Elle Magazine

“The Memory Palace is almost a fairy tale: two little girls grow up under the spell of their mother’s madness. But it really did happen, once upon a time, and Mira Bartók 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 Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry

“The story of Mira Bartók’s tormented relationship with her mother initially recalls Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle in its riveting depiction of unconventional families. But in lyrically elegant prose, Bartók’s The Memory Palace explores not just relationships but the slippery nature of memory itself…a heartbreaking expression of devotion to a mother she loved but had to abandon in order to survive.” —O 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’s mentally ill mother’s notebook…an extraordinary mix.” —The Washington Post

“The ineffable functioning of memory and the brain itself is integral to Bartók’s complex story. She brilliantly teases out the emotional and physical fallout of her mother’s brain, damaged by illness…The fact that Bartók can convey how and why she still loves her mother is perhaps the book’s 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

“This moving, compassionately candid memoir by artist and children’s book author Bartók describes a life dominated by her gifted but schizophrenic mother…a haunting, almost patchwork, narrative that lyrically chronicles a complex mother-daughter relationship.”—Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

“Neither sensational nor cagily sentimental nor self pitying, this grounded, exquisitely written work…requires reading.” —Library Journal

“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 mother’s illness had on both her and her sister. Strongly recommended.” —E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., author of The Insanity Offense

“Mira Bartók’s harrowing and beautiful tale of growing up with her paranoid schizophrenic mother is in some ways a memoir about memory itself. For Bartók—suffering from a brain injury and raised by someone who had tenuous contact with the external world—the 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.” —Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

“Mira Bartók’s Memory Palace is a beautifully crafted tale of life with an absent father and a mentally ill mother. As the story unfolds, you’ll see how fine the line is between gentle artistic creativity and debilitating madness. With each new vignette, Mira reveals the wonder and the horror of life in a house ruled by insanity. As the daughters get older, the mother devolves, making her way from world-class musician to paranoid homeless schizophrenic. Despite that tragedy, Mira’s spirit never fails to shine through. You’ll wish you could pick her up, like a little lost kitten, but in the end, she makes it on her own.” —John Elder Robison, author of Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Aspberger’s and Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian with Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers

“Mira Bartók’s memoir will haunt you with its compassion for people who have mental illness and for the tender vulnerability of their children. Bartók’s 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 you’re 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 Sister’s 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 artist’s struggle to claim her own creative life.  Bartók carries us, room to luminous room, through her memory palace, filling it with stories that link loss to grace, guilt to love, the natural world’s 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 Bartók 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 Bartók’s 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, Bartók’s gilded prose and encyclopedic mind lead the reader through her life’s darkest chambers where debilitating mental illness sends the author’s mother spiraling from a promising career as a concert pianist to years of madness. But Bartok 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 mother’s flashpoints of lucidity, and their equally ravishing intellects. From this great height Bartók shows us that art’s 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 you’d 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, I’d consider making out with it.” —Library Journal Book Smack!, starred review

“Some books you carry with you while you’re reading them—in your purse, your e-reader, whatever–but this is one you also carry along well after the last page, on a small mantel in your own memory palace…It’s an arresting, compassionate, and unforgettable memoir.” —BUST magazine

“Poignant, powerful, disturbing, and exceedingly well-written, this is an unforgettable memoir of loss and recovery, love and forgiveness.” –Booklist, starred review

“Bartók’s 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.”—John T. Slania, Bookpage