By Claire Phillips
August 2020. Paperback.
$18.95 | 9781733957908
$14.99 | 9781733957984 (ebook – available from all online retailers)
Claire Phillips’ elegantly written and unflinching memoir about her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer diagnosed in mid-life with paranoid schizophrenia, challenges current conceptions about mental illness, relapse and recovery, as well as difficulties caring for an aging parent with a chronic disease. Told in fragments, the work also becomes a startling reflection on the evolution of feminism as seen through mother-daughter relationships.
Only with her mother’s final relapse at age 73 did the author begin to tell this story, first in Black Clock magazine, an essay for which she received a Pushcart nomination and notable mention in The Best American Essays 2015.
PRAISE
As heroic as it is original, Claire Phillips’ writing always finds the scary corners that would be secret to any other author, from which inevitably there comes into vision a revelatory perspective. Reading A Room With a Darker View, you won’t shake it from your mind; finishing it, you won’t shake it from your memory.
– Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville and Shadowbahn
An engrossing story of identity formation, Phillips ultimately gives us not a confessional memoir but a parable of agency and resilience amid uncertain reality. As a speculative fiction writer whose work is rooted in an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, she crafts a tale of time travel, one where past-present-futures collapse into braided familial, personal, and social histories. Throughout the book Phillips illuminates the fierce reality of her mother’s delusions as well as the tools she gives her daughter to survive her.
– Connie Samaras
Short, distilled chapters of quietly tantalizing prose grip us throughout the span of Claire Phillips' fully realized and haunting story.
– Bruce Bauman, author of And the Word Was and Broken Sleep
An inventively told and wholly original memoir.
– David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Claire Phillips is the author of the memoir A Room with a Darker View: Chronicles of My Mother and Schizophrenia (DoppelHouse) and the novella Black Market Babies (11th Hour Press). She is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets prize and a Pushcart Prize notable. Her writing has appeared in Black Clock magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Largehearted Boy, Joyland, Los Angeles Review of Books, Motherboard-Vice, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among other places. She teaches writing at CalArts, SCI-Arc, and U.C. Irvine, and is Director of the Los Angeles Writers Reading Series at Glendale College. She holds a M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University and a B.A. in English from San Francisco State University.
