THE BETTER PART OF WORSE

A family is torn apart by schizophrenia in Martin’s historical novel.

Jamie Murphy was raised to be a priest, but at the last moment, the 21-year-old seminarian forsakes the vocation in favor of business school and a chance at romantic love. He meets Katie Houlihan, a college-bound secretary at a law office, and falls fast for her. In less than a year, they’re married, and Katie is pregnant. After the birth of their daughter Meggie, however, Katie is plagued by feelings of depression, anxiety, and rage. “I can’t explain what was wrong with me,” she tells her sister, describing her mood in the months after the birth. “It was like I was dead inside, unable to feel anything at all. I was trapped in an awful place.” After the birth of a second daughter, Katie starts having delusions that she is a prophet of God and that Satan is attempting to undo her with demons disguised as family members. Jaime is forced to institutionalize his wife, who is diagnosed with dementia praecox—also known as schizophrenia. Will he ever get his beloved Katie back, or is she lost forever inside the twin labyrinths of a poorly understood disease and an ill-equipped mental health system? The novel’s first 100 pages are largely friction-free. Jamie and Katie are wholesome, bland people who everyone likes and who like each other. This makes the horror of Katie’s condition that much more striking when it arrives. Here, Katie arrives at the hospital but won’t give up her infant, Patsy: “Two towering male orderlies had stepped in, and even the nurse, who, despite her starched white dress and cap, resembled a wrestler, had pried Patsy from Katie’s arms….Katie’s screams had pierced the air as the orderlies strapped her to the gurney, kicking and thrashing all the way inside.” Martin takes the readers to dark places but does so with a great deal of compassion, dramatizing an experience that even today is surrounded by shame and misunderstanding.

An affecting, decades-spanning tale of love and mental illness.