The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times

An academic's life as an asylum patient is illuminated in this intriguing memoir of illness and institutionalization. Taylor, a historian, grew up in Saskatoon as the daughter of political parents, her father a Welsh-born immigrant to Canada and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, her mother from a prominent Canadian Jewish family. Her childhood is troubled, her relationship with her philandering father angry and combative, with her mother loving but often critical. After a breakdown while living in London, Taylor enters Friern Hospital, one of three stints under institutional care in the 1980s. Her new home is a place of contradictions, full of "remorseless aloneness" yet also conducive to genuine friendship and solidarity amongst patients. Taylor intersperses her narrative with vignettes of sessions with her psychoanalyst identified only as "V." She writes with an academic's devotion to precision, an eschewal of self-pity evident even as she delves into her most emotionally harrowing experiences. While the analysis of the roots of her psychic trauma prior to institutionalization seems weaker and more diffuse than her descriptions of asylum life, the memoir's mixture of personal recollection and social history will provide fodder for those interested in a much misunderstood form of psychiatric treatment. Agent: David Godwin. (Aug.)