Just Jennifer

Sharp: A Memoir by David Fitzpatrick (William Morrow, September 2012)

In an honest, unapologetic and unflinching memoir, David Fitzpatrick chronicles his twenty-year battle with mental illness, the time he spent in institutions, how it affected his family and how they affected his disease and recovery.  Fitzpatrick begins his serious cutting as a young man, the beginning of his spiral downward into a deep despair and breakdown from which there seemed little hope of him being able to return.  Fitzpatrick came from a family of mentally ill people (including an aunt and a grandmother) and encountered several abusive males through his childhood and spent his college years often in an unfocused stupor.  As he made his slow climb out of his despair, he took strength from his younger brother Dennis who, as a sufferer of Williams syndrome, is almost perpetually happy.  Even when David is at the lowest points of his disease, he is still very self-aware and seeks for new behaviors to replace the cutting, though some are not acceptable forms of release either.  David describes his fellow mental patients with compassion and empathy, and the realization that there are others worse off than he.  As unsettling as this story is, it is compulsively readable: you will root for David and his recovery and cheer his victories and hope for his future.