Mark Vonnegut, the oldest son of the late Kurt Vonnegut, suffered a mental breakdown at 23 and was hospitalized. Five years later he got into Harvard Medical School. He became a successful pediatrician in Boston and wrote about his illness and recovery in a highly praised memoir, “The Eden Express,’’ in 1975.
JUST LIKE SOMEONE WITHOUT MENTAL ILLNESS ONLY MORE SO
By Mark Vonnegut
Delacorte, 203 pp., $24
“It was a perfectly good story with a perfectly good ending,’’ Vonnegut notes in his remarkable new memoir, but it didn’t end there. He suffered three more psychotic breaks. Then, at the time of the fourth and last one in 1985, he was “an almost-40-year-old, home-owning, married father of two boys who was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and who coached soccer.’’ He had recently been named “the number one pediatrician by Boston magazine’’ and felt “it’s important to me that I owned the house they took me out of in a straightjacket.’’