Songs of Three Islands: A Story of Mental Illness in an Iconic American Family

According to Monks, her mother, Lucy Carnegie, spent her childhood not on Florida’s tony Cumberland Island, but “where sharks swam up in the spring to give birth and foolish young cousins swam in the warm waters.” The Carnegie family’s vast wealth “created a Brigadoon-like fantasy, which they could never leave because they couldn’t function in the outside world.” Monks’s mother suffered from mentally illness; her father “brought mistresses to dine;” as an adolescent, Monks locked herself in her room nurturing a fear that she would look in the mirror and see her mother looking back. Her parents divorced and her mother married a man who later killed himself. Eventually, Monks married and had a daughter who struggled with drugs, alcohol, and the same depression that Monks has fought all her life. The family illness has deep roots, we learn; the hospital where Monks sends her daughter for treatment has treated at least four other relatives. This tiny but powerful book is most riveting when dealing with the famous but fractured family and not with Monks’s more recent life, which includes consultations with mystics and audiences with Deepak Chopra. (June)