His Bright Light: The Story of Nick Traina • The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father's Struggle With Madness • Ordinary Paradise

Three personal accounts that focus on the loss of a family member are reviewed here. Danielle Steel, in His Bright Light, details her struggles with her son's mental illness and substance abuse and his suicide. Nathaniel Lachenmeyer, in The Outsider, describes losing his father first to schizophrenia and then to death, and Laura Furman, in Ordinary Paradise, portrays the experiences of a woman whose mother dies from cancer when she is a young teenager.

His Bright Light is a tragic love story whose principals are a mother and her son. The mother is Danielle Steel, a well-known author. She was married at age 18 and had one daughter; had a brief second marriage to a convicted rapist; and was pregnant out of wedlock with her second child, Nick, whose father she married shortly before Nick's birth. She married again, to John Traina, a man with two sons of his own, who subsequently adopted Nick. Fairly quickly, Steel gave birth to four more daughters and another son.

Nick Traina was a young man who, throughout his short life, marched to the beat of his own drummer—"he was never in harmony with what was going on around him, or what other people were doing." Much of the time he was the object of a debate about whether he was a spoiled rich kid or had a significant mental illness. His life included multiple psychiatric admissions for drug abuse and manic-depressive illness, round-the-clock caretakers, a surrogate mother who tag-teamed with his own mother, and three serious suicide attempts, the last of which ended his life at age 19.

Steel raises a plethora of interesting issues, including how to obtain accurate diagnoses for a child and adolescent; when to set limits for an apparently seriously mentally ill son; what the boundaries should be between mother and son and between mother and caretakers of the son; what to do when a mother's sense of doom about her son is minimized by professionals; and how to evaluate the help one is receiving.

Steel's sense of her son was that "Nick was like a burning cigarette tossed to the dry grass at the edge of a summer forest. He was a forest fire waiting to happen, and while the conflagration began to burn, and the flames began to devour him, none of us could yet see it."

Nick himself was in perpetual, painful turmoil. As he described it in one of his many journal extracts used in the book, "Normal is bad, balance is shit, I want to be angry and fierce and shirtless and sweating, screaming at the top of my lungs and clawing on my own skin for the rest of my life. I want to roll on the dirty carpet, the air raid sirens exploding above me, ripping the air to shreds, I want to be hungry and alone, hating the world, hating my parents, hating myself. I don't want to have to call anybody on a phone, and have to pretend to be happy, have to pretend to be everything I am not. I can't handle all of it anymore."

Steel tried every avenue that she could imagine to obtain competent professional help for her son. She reflects, "It was a time of terrifying frustration. I am a capable, reasonable, rational, intelligent, fairly strong-willed, competent person, with ample funds at my disposal, terrific resources, and an ability to get things on track quickly. If I couldn't make things happen for Nick, and get help for him, I shudder to think at what happens to people who are too shy or too frightened to speak up, people who don't know their way around." Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the book is a mother's inability to save her son, even with all the resources available to her.

His Bright Light is not without problems as a first-person account. It is much too long. One tires rather quickly of the superlatives Steel uses to describe her son. The book is repetitive. And it fails to adequately deal with the psychological costs to the other children in the family because of Nick's mental illness and his mother's devotion to him and to dealing with his illness.

Despite these shortcomings, His Bright Light is worth a read by professionals involved in treating adolescents or their families; by family members who are struggling with issues of family burden; and by young adults with and without diagnosed mental illness who could glean from this book a sense of the potential costs that their behavior could levy on themselves and their family.

In her book Danielle Steel struggles to understand her son; in The Outsider Nathaniel Lachenmeyer struggles to understand his father. The Outsider is a son's reconstruction of a father's battle with mental illness. Nathaniel's father, Charles, was born in 1943 and died in 1995. Nathaniel's parents divorced in 1981, when the son was ten years old, and between 1981 and 1995 Lachenmeyer saw his father only twice. He received about 20 letters from his father, the last one in 1991. Further, he knew that his paternal grandmother had diagnoses of paranoid schizophrenia and alcohol abuse. In The Outsider, Lachenmeyer describes his search to find, understand, and perhaps establish a posthumous relationship with the father he hardly knew in life.

Charles Lachenmeyer, a former professor of sociology, became a transient, generally homeless individual suffering from schizophrenia. His resourcefulness, and probably his intelligence, kept him on the streets and out of hospitals until he was 41 years old. He was then admitted to New Hampshire State Hospital for a 16-month stay. He was readmitted there twice, and then had two admissions to Vermont State Hospital; the second, in 1994, lasted ten months. Five weeks after his discharge from that admission, he was dead.

Nathaniel Lachenmeyer describes very little about these hospitalizations, perhaps because so much of his work was done retrospectively. However, sources that would have allowed him to provide a better picture of his father's hospital life are available, and it is unfortunate that the author did not take advantage of them.

Nathaniel is very respectful of his father's struggle with mental illness. He says, "Here, a man had fought the greatest battle of all: the battle to preserve the dominion of self against an invading cancer of the mind." Charles Lachenmeyer's decline was not an acute break but instead a slow, progressive loss of contact with reality. That decline resulted in his losing contact with all the people who had been meaningful in his life.

Throughout the father's illness, it is the father who understands that "what people suffering from schizophrenia need more than anything else is sustained social contact." The son, who had in essence divorced himself from contact with his father, learns this only in following his father's trail after his death.

The Outsider suffers from being a reconstruction; it is repetitive, and it provides a structure and meaning to a mentally ill person's words and actions that may or may not be accurate. However, it is a touching portrayal of the cost to a family when a parent suffers from a mental illness that causes the family's disintegration.

One lesson of The Outsider is that the lives of the Lachenmeyer family need not have taken the course they did if adequate treatment had been offered and accepted. However, this lesson carries no guarantee. As Steel shows in His Bright Light, all the treatment that money can buy is no guarantee against a tragic outcome.

In Ordinary Paradise, Laura Furman provides her life history in response to her mother's death in 1959 from cancer, only some six months after the cancer was diagnosed. The author was 13 and a half years old, and her mother was 46.

Furman is primarily a writer of fiction, but this first-person account is a self-confrontation. As Furman indicates in the opening pages: "I have always been timid about my family's past and my own, as if the past were a party I wasn't invited to. When I spent time remembering, I did so guiltily, not wishing to be caught wondering about the past. The past dominated my life and informed my present, though I didn't see that except in fleeting glimpses of understanding."

Furman's story springs from New York City Jewish roots, but it contains many universal themes. Perhaps one of the more interesting is the set of issues raised by the fact that Furman's mother didn't tell her daughter she was dying. Furman the adult says, "It would have made all the difference. It would have spared me from everything. Her death would never have moved to the realm of the unsaid and the mystical, the destined. It would have stayed in the more ordinary realm of biology."

This sense was heightened because nobody in the family talked about the mother after her death. When Furman was called on to take over some of her mother's functions, she felt she needed to act "as if [my mother] never existed. [But] if she hadn't existed, I didn't either."

The second universal theme is that of the "replacement mother." Furman says, "My own mother might have wished nothing more than for me to have a real second mother, but out of loyalty to her I didn't acknowledge even to myself for decades that I wanted a mother. I had a mother, I would say fiercely if anyone suggested that this or that might betoken a search for a mother."

The third universal theme is an individual's response to a psychiatric hospitalization. Furman was hospitalized at age 16, because of suicidality and depression. Here her autobiography shines as she poetically describes her thoughts about being a psychiatric patient, highlighting both her magical expectations for the experience and its actual resultant regressive outcomes. The author writes, "In the hospital I learned to distrust myself as if I were filled with demons that now and then put me at the mercy of adults. The hospitalization, logically, might have taught me to take care of myself, since no one else was about to do it. Instead, I became a stranger to my own best needs, and a guessing game ensued, as if I were the last to know my own feelings and desires."

"It is true for every adult," she writes, "that we must learn to be our own best parent. Long after I was finished with my stay at the hospital, I still waited for the adults around me—at home, in school, on the job—to be good parents at last. The waiting retarded my maturing and perpetuated that twilight of my childhood far too long."

Furman poignantly describes the outcomes of the loss of a parent at an early age. In this regard, Ordinary Paradise might well be read in conjunction with another autobiography, City of One, by Francine Cournos (1), and also with a treatise on the subject of the early death of a parent, The Loss That Is Forever, by Maxine Harris (2).

Dr. Geller is professor of psychiatry and director of public-sector psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.