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Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

PREFACE TO THE 2002 EDITION

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION SCHIZOPHRENIA

Chapter 1 - TRAVELING HOPEFULLY

Chapter 2 - ARRIVING

Chapter 3 - ROUNDS TWO, THREE, AND GOING HOME

Chapter 4 - LETTER TO ANITA

AFTERWORD

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Copyright Page

PRAISE FOR MARK VONNEGUT’S

THE EDEN EXPRESS

“A searching, vivid account…of the inside of a schizophrenic breakdown, the struggle to recover, to understand.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“A painfully honest document of life in transition.”

—Time

“A remarkable book.”

—The Atlantic

“Mark Vonnegut’s remembrance of what it was like in the 1960s is not only a memoir about his loss of political and social innocence, and ours, but a surprisingly good-natured trip through his own head.… A highly readable, touching, and affectingly vulnerable book.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Considerable courage and endurance lie behind this unpretentious and enlightening memoir.”

—Publishers Weekly

“His description of his schizophrenic experiences are not only convincing from a clinical standpoint but are written in an engaging style, with an admirable lack of self-pity. His story is worth reading.”

—Library Journal

“A disarmingly open, engrossing, oddly graceful chronicle.”

—Kirkus Reviews

To Mark Adin Boles. If not for you I wouldn’t have bothered to fight.

To my father. Without you I wouldn’t have known how to fight.

To J. Ross MacLean. Without you I never would have stopped fighting.

FOREWORD

A MOVIE ACTOR TELEPHONED me a couple of years after this book was published. We had never met, but he knew my son had gone crazy and then recovered. His own son was going crazy, and he was in need of advice. He asked how my son was, and I told him Mark had just graduated from Harvard Medical School. He said, “Some remission!” I said, “We were lucky, and I certainly hope you will be lucky, too.”

That was the best I could do back then. That is the best I could do right now. Put another way: Some people survived going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Others didn’t. The turbulence is really something.

My son Mark’s most unsociable performance when bananas, and before I could get him into a Canadian laughing academy, was to babble on and on, and then wing a cue ball through a picture window in an urban commune in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was only then that his flower children friends telephoned me to say he was in need of a father.

God bless telephones.

Mark’s dear mother Jane Marie, née Cox, now dead, a Quaker and, like Mark, a graduate of the Quaker college Swarthmore in Pennsylvania, would often tell him that he was supposed to save the world. His college major had been religion, and he had not yet considered becoming what he has indeed become, a pediatrician. One seeming possibility before he went nuts was that he study for the Unitarian ministry.

He was then twenty-two, and I myself was a mere spring chicken of forty-seven, a mere thirty-two years ago. By the time Mark and I went in a hired car from the house with the busted picture window in Vancouver to what turned out to be an excellent private mental hospital in nearby New Westminster, he had at least become a jazz saxophonist and a picture painter. He babbled merrily en route, and it was language, but the words were woven into vocal riffs worthy of his hero John Coltrane.

While we awaited Mark’s admission in the front lobby of the Canuck loony bin, which, one has to say, had the therapeutically unfortunate name “Hollywood Hospital,” Mark dug both hands into a big bowl of sand and cigarette butts. When a male nurse appeared to greet us, Mark started painting a picture with his filthy fingers on the bosom of the man’s white uniform. The nurse couldn’t have been nicer about that.

So Mark eventually recovered his sanity, as, so I am told, the movie actor’s son did not.

And I recall now a time when I pondered buying from a gift shop a pretty object sacred to believers in a faith I knew nothing about. Only kidding,