The Memory Palace

Authors: Mira Bartók

Praise for

The Memory Palace

“Mira Bartók’s memoir will haunt you with its compassion for people who have mental illness and for the tender vulnerability of their children. Bartók’s writing is at times spare and at times lyrical as she struggles in the unpredictable and unsafe world of being the child of a paranoid schizophrenic. ‘How heavy is a dresser when you’re the only one pushing it against the door?’ she asks, distilling years of nights of fear. Beautifully written, touchingly told,
The Memory Palace
lingers, radiating with pain and fear, love and freedom.”

—J
ANINE
L
ATUS
, author of
If I Am Missing or Dead: A Sister’s Story of Love, Murder and Liberation

“The Memory Palace
is a stunning meditation on the tenacity of familial bonds, even in the face of extreme adversity, and an artist’s struggle to claim her own creative life. Bartók carries us, room to luminous room, through her memory palace, filling it with stories that link loss to grace, guilt to love, the natural world’s great beauty to the creative act, and tragic beginnings to quietly triumphant closings. This extraordinary book, with its beautiful illuminated images, will stay with me.”

— MEREDITH HALL, author of
Without a Map

“Schizophrenia is more than a thief of the mind and Mira Bartók gives us the layered understanding to see the illness for all its cruel manifestations when the illness hijacks her mother. The best memoirs illuminate us all, and
The Memory Palace
left me illuminated with Bartók’s courage and unwavering belief in artistic expression in the midst of a shattered family. The writing is spectacular.”

— J
ACQUELINE
S
HEEHAN,
PH.D.
New York Times bestselling author of Lost & Found, and Now & Then

“In The Memory Palace
, Bartók’s gilded prose and encyclopedic mind lead the reader through her life’s darkest chambers where debilitating mental illness sends the author’s mother spiraling from a promising career as a concert pianist to years of madness. But Bartók does not merely decorate her palace with humanistic portraits of the
mentally ill and the seemingly insurmountable challenges they and their families face. She takes the reader up secret staircases illuminated by her own irrepressible creativity and struggle to survive, her mother’s flashpoints of lucidity, and their equally ravishing intellects. From this great height Bartók shows us that art’s healing powers affect even those that illness has pushed to the shadowiest extremes of the human experience.
The Memory Palace
is a grand, unforgettable estate.”

— E
LYSSA
E
AST
, author of
Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town

“A disturbing, mesmerizing personal narrative about growing up with a brilliant but schizophrenic mother. . . . Richly textured, compassionate and heartbreaking.”

— K
IRKUS
R
EVIEWS
, starred review

“Neither sensational nor cagily sentimental nor self pitying, this grounded, exquisitely written work . . . requires reading.”

—L
IBRARY
J
OURNAL

“All you’d need is to see my copy to know-I have Post-it notes marking phrases and sentences I wanted to repeat because they were so good. About one-third of the way through, I thought that if this book were a person, I’d consider making out with it.”

—L
IBRARY
J
OURNAL
B
OOK
S
MACK
!, starred review

“Bartók juggles a handful of profound themes: how to undertake a creative
life … how we remember … how one says goodbye to a loved one in a manner that might redeem in some small way a life and a relationship blighted by psychosis; and, most vividly and harrowingly, how our society and institutions throw mental illness back in the hands of family members, who are frequently helpless to deal with the magnitude of the terrifying problems it generates. On all counts, it’s an engrossing read.”

— E
LLE
magazine”

Author’s Note

Nearly all the names of those who appear in this book have remained intact. However, I have changed the names of a couple people so as to protect their privacy. I have also reconstructed various conversations and condensed certain moments from my life.

This is a book about memory itself as much as it is a book about my relationship with my mother and I have tried my best to follow my own memory’s capricious and meandering path along the way. As for my mother’s diary entries between each chapter—they are her words but my headings.

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First Free Press hardcover edition January 2011

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Illustrations by Mira Bartók

Art photography by Adam Laipson

Book design by Ellen R. Sasahara

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bartók, Mira.

The memory palace / by Mira Bartók.

p. cm.

1. Herr, Norma Kurap, 1926–2007. 2. Bartók, Mira. 3. Children of the mentally ill—
United States—Biography. 4. Mentally ill parents—United States—Biography.
I. Herr, Norma Kurap, 1926–2007. II. Title.
RC464.H47 2011
362.2085092—dc22
[B 2010008399
ISBN 978-1-4391-8331-1
ISBN 978-1-4391-8333-5 (ebook)