Product Description

Set in Tidewater, Virginia, in the 1980's and early 1990's "Angelhead" documents the violent, drug-addled descent of the author's brother, Michael, into paranoid schizophrenia. From Michael's first psychotic break aged 14 through a series of petty crimes, bizarre disappearances, and suicide attempts to the shocking crime that landed him in the psychiatric wing of a maximum-security prision, "Angelhead" presents, first-hand, the fragmenting of a mind and a family. This prose offers no consolation or easy answers - simply emotional precision and the satisfaction of hard, unflinching truth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #103053 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 211 pages

From the Publisher
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius...
GIST: The facts informing this devastating memoir are these: In 1980, Greg Bottoms's older brother Michael dropped six hits of acid at an Ozzy Ozbourne concert and saw God. From that day onward, Michael had a "head full of God." God was in the TV, God was in the microwave (Michael read the setting "300" as "GOD"). Everywhere, everything, was God.

UPSHOT: Like any great work of art, Angelhead reads as if it were written to save the author's life. In that manner, it's a necessary book, one that will undoubtedly make you think about how relatively sane your little life seems. The doctors finally called Michael a "paranoid schizophrenic," but where's the awful beauty in that? Far more interesting is the fire-and-brimstone brilliance of the writing that amounts to the author's own diagnosis. "I'd been sucked into Michael and God and Satan's void," Bottoms writes, "an upside-down world where dreams were as solid as stone. I wanted, for one fleeting moment, to have hallucinated, to have broken through reality's delicate plane and into the world of the insane."

-ESQUIRE

About the Author
Greg Bottoms writes regularly for on-line magazines such as Salon and Nerve.

Customer Reviews

Superb and Very Moving!
This book absolutely devastated me and I have not been able to stop thinking about it since finishing it last week. The writing is fast and gorgeously poetic without ever seeming too much so (as is the case in a lot of literary memoirs). But it is the emotional insight into what it is like to grow up around madness that sets this book apart. I think this will become a classic mental illness memoir. Every bit as good as Tim Lott's Scent of Dried Roses or even Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted.

A moving, personal memoir.
Greg Bottoms depiction of life with a sibling who pocesses a devistating mental illness is both elequant and moving. Greg takes the reader with him through his childhood, sharing with them the humiliation, tourcher and suffering he experienced at the hands of his brother. An unselfish depiction of a hard life. A great book for anyone who is unfamiliar with the illness and the devistating secondary effects on loved ones.

Perfect account of how mental illness effects the family.
Greg Bottoms perfectally illustrates how devistating mental illness can be, not only to the sufferer, but to the family. Greg takes the reader into his own personal hell as the brother of a schizophrenic. Emotional and shocking, i was unable to put the book down. A must read for anyone who is unaware of the condition.