I grew up on Kurt Vonnegut's literature, having stumbled upon "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater" at the age of 13. To this day, I still possess 10 Kurt Vonnegut books and an additional 2 copies of Welcome to the Monkey House. What does this have to do with his son, the illustrious Mark Vonnegut? Well, just imagine how much I admired Kurt Vonnegut...now transfer that feeling to his son, a man towards whom I feel a particularly kinship to due to his bipolar/quasi-schizophrenia disorder. Now, multiply that mushy Hallmark feeling times 10 and that's how I feel about his newest memoir, "Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So."
My favorite sentence thus far has been where he states that you can tell who has the mental illness in his family by pointing at the people who look ten or more years younger than their actual ages. I had to crack up. All of my classmates originally thought I was mid-twenties or younger until I laughingly confessed I was pushing thirty. "Must be all the laughing and crying...it keeps the facial muscles toned," says Mark Vonnegut on the subject.
I also had to crack up at the part where he states his new, post-psychosis goal of becoming a doctor: he had all of a 1.8 GPA in the math and science field going into college again. "It seemed natural," he said, then cited the optimism of mania. Thankfully for his patients, Mark Vonnegut was stable for the period during his medical schooling (take THAT Stanford professor who thinks no mentally ill person should bother to apply to med school because we shouldn't be allowed to be in the medical field in the first place~!! Ha ha, counter-evidence to your biased discrimination!). He is now an M.D. That's right, M.D. Capital letters and everything!
If Mark Vonnegut MD had typed up a bland, melodramatic memoir, I still would have been inspired. But his memoir is littered with wit, charm, self-deprecating moments, and a tendency to organize paragraphs slightly more loosely than one of those Normal writers (if there exists such a thing as a Normal writer, aren't writers generally moody? See "Touched by Fire" by Kay Redfield Jamison for a psychology study on the prevalence of depression and mania in successful writers). This turns his book into a mental playground where the swings are sentences, the monkey bars, paragraphs, and the sandbox, whole chapters! I love this book.
It is not enough that he has accomplished so much---this is something he says---but what came in between all those accomplishments that is really the soul of Mark Vonnegut. I agree. Was it really my "intelligence" or "aptitude" that got me into graduate school despite my mental illness, or was it those years I spent lugging trash bags to the dumpster outside the pizza joint I worked at, delusional and convinced that my boss was plotting to kill me after everyone else clocked out? Horrifying, yes, but it helped put things in perspective. No injustice in academia is as bad as lugging restaurant trash into the night rain, checking behind me for the angry boss who probably really did hate me, wondering if there was anything in life outside of a pizza joint. There is, not that there is anything wrong with working in a pizza joint...I just prefer to write essays, I guess.
My favorite sentence thus far has been where he states that you can tell who has the mental illness in his family by pointing at the people who look ten or more years younger than their actual ages. I had to crack up. All of my classmates originally thought I was mid-twenties or younger until I laughingly confessed I was pushing thirty. "Must be all the laughing and crying...it keeps the facial muscles toned," says Mark Vonnegut on the subject.
I also had to crack up at the part where he states his new, post-psychosis goal of becoming a doctor: he had all of a 1.8 GPA in the math and science field going into college again. "It seemed natural," he said, then cited the optimism of mania. Thankfully for his patients, Mark Vonnegut was stable for the period during his medical schooling (take THAT Stanford professor who thinks no mentally ill person should bother to apply to med school because we shouldn't be allowed to be in the medical field in the first place~!! Ha ha, counter-evidence to your biased discrimination!). He is now an M.D. That's right, M.D. Capital letters and everything!
If Mark Vonnegut MD had typed up a bland, melodramatic memoir, I still would have been inspired. But his memoir is littered with wit, charm, self-deprecating moments, and a tendency to organize paragraphs slightly more loosely than one of those Normal writers (if there exists such a thing as a Normal writer, aren't writers generally moody? See "Touched by Fire" by Kay Redfield Jamison for a psychology study on the prevalence of depression and mania in successful writers). This turns his book into a mental playground where the swings are sentences, the monkey bars, paragraphs, and the sandbox, whole chapters! I love this book.
It is not enough that he has accomplished so much---this is something he says---but what came in between all those accomplishments that is really the soul of Mark Vonnegut. I agree. Was it really my "intelligence" or "aptitude" that got me into graduate school despite my mental illness, or was it those years I spent lugging trash bags to the dumpster outside the pizza joint I worked at, delusional and convinced that my boss was plotting to kill me after everyone else clocked out? Horrifying, yes, but it helped put things in perspective. No injustice in academia is as bad as lugging restaurant trash into the night rain, checking behind me for the angry boss who probably really did hate me, wondering if there was anything in life outside of a pizza joint. There is, not that there is anything wrong with working in a pizza joint...I just prefer to write essays, I guess.
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