Street roots
13
July 22, 2011
A famous dad and an
infamous illness
With mental illness, says memoirist
M ark Vonnegut, the trick is to not take
your feelings so seriously
BY JULIA CECHVALA
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
J u s t L ik e Someone W ithout
M ental Illness Only More
So
B y M a rk Vonnegut, M .D .,'
Delacorte Press, 2011,
Hardcover, 2 0 3 pages, $24
A few years before he died I had the
pleasure of seeing Kurt Vonnegut speak to a
sold-out crowd at the University of
Wisconsin - Madison. I remember him
saying he didn’t have much hope for the
world, we’ve screwed it up too badly already,
but that a few things still make life
worthwhile, one of them being music. On
that note he ended his talk, cued the
auditorium to fill with the
transcendent notes of Strauss’
“Blue Danube” and proceeded to
waltz around the stage with an
imaginary partner.
Kurt passed on his enjoyment of
the arts as a saving grace to his
son Mark Vonnegut, who includes
a few of his own paintings in his
new memoir, “Just Like Someone
Without Mental Illness Only More
So.” Growing up in a houséhold
with a long history of mental
illness and a father who spoke of
suicide casually, Mark tells how
the arts have been a coping
strategy throughout his life in
dealing with bipolar disorder.
Mark’s story of humility and grace in
striving to live a normal life and maintaining
a demanding career - all while living with
mental illness — is worthy in it’s own right.
That it offers insight into what it was like to
be the son of one of America’s most famous
authors is just a bonus.
Mark’s writing voice contains a touch of
his father’s, combining irreverence and
humor in observing the improbable and
ironic nature of life. He writes, “If you take
good care of any disease by eating well,
sleeping well, being aware of your health,
consciously wanting to be well, not smoking,
et cetera, you are doing all the same things
you should be doing anyway, but somehow
having a disease makes them easier to do. A
human without a disease is like a ship
without a rudder.”
Readers of Mark’s first memoir, “The
Eden Express,” will be relieved to find that
his new book reflects his improved mental
health and reads in an easy, orderly fashion
without going into the delusional stream-of-
consciousness episodes illustrating his
breaks with reality. My only complaint is
that in paring the story down to interesting
vignettes he skips over many details of
major family events like births, deaths and
divorces. My curiosity, as well as love for his
father’s writing, makes me want to know
even more about this deeply imperfect, yet
brilliant family, this family in which, Mark
says, no one was average.
Having grown up with parents with
mental illness, gone through his own
psychotic break, recovered and then gone
through it again, Mark has such a familiarity
with the subject he is able to speak in frank,
honestterm s that normalize, without
romanticizing. “There are no people
anywhere who don’t have some mental
illness. It all depends on where you set the
bar and how hard you look. What is a myth
is that we are mostly mentally well most of
the time.”
Mark also tells of his struggles with
addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs.
Illness and achieving a tenuous hold on
wellbeing have been such an ever-present
element of his life it is no wonder that he
was attracted to the healing field. Yet Mark
recognizes the degree of irony fitting to a
Vonnegut that the only medical school to
accept him was Harvard. He has seen the
healthcare system from both sides, and
offers multiple perspectives on its successes
and failures. He tells of helping choose who
is allowed a chance at becoming a doctor
though admission to Harvard’s medical
school, and of treating children in Honduras
on a volunteer medical trip.
He also rants about the
.
corruption and brokenness
brought into the field by the
insurance industry.
by Brian Feist
Mark’s greatest insights
though, come from his own
Outside right now beasts
journey toward wellbeing:
are swallowing
“With mental illness the
rigid thoughts
trick is to not take your
digesting
feelings so seriously; you’re
defecating out sanitized
zooming in and zooming
sound bites of soft freedom
away from things that go
from being too important to
being not important at all....
I could zoom in or out to see how they
looked without trying to change them. If I
was lucky, I might find things that could be
part of how I try to tell the truth.” -
The first truth is that none of the
thoughts going by are worth drinking over.
The one other thing I remember about
Kurt’s talk is how he emphasized telling the
truth. Mark seems to have picked that up as
well.
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