{"product_id":"9780008300609_the-fragments-of-my-father-a-memoir-of-madness-love-and-being-a-carer","title":"The Fragments of my Father: A memoir of madness, love and being a carer","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eA NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eIn the vein of the Costa-winning \u003cem\u003eDadland\u003c\/em\u003e, with the biographical elements of \u003cem\u003eH is for Hawk\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eThe Fragments of my Father\u003c\/em\u003e is a powerful and poignant memoir about parents and children, freedom and responsibility, madness and creativity and what it means to be a carer.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSHORTLISTED FOR THE BARBELLION PRIZE\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eMy life had been suspended, as though I had inhaled and was still waiting to let out that gasp of breath. I set aside my dreams for a future time when life might be normal again. But that night, on my mother’s birthday, as I sat and watched the sky turn from blue to black, I wondered for the first time if it ever would …\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere were holes in Sam Mills’s life when she was growing up – times when her dad was just absent, for reasons she didn’t understand. As she grew older, she began to make up stories about the periods when he wasn’t around: that he’d been abducted, spirited away and held captive by a mysterious tribe who lived at the bottom of the garden. The truth – that he suffers from a rare form of paranoid schizophrenia, and was hospitalised intermittently – slowly came into focus, and that focus became pin-sharp in 2012, when Sam’s mother died and Sam was left as his primary carer.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this powerful, poignant memoir Sam triangulates her own experience with the stories of two other carers, one she admires and one, on some days, she fears she might become: Leonard Woolf, husband to Virginia and F Scott Fitzgerald, husband to Zelda, and a man whose personality made him ill-equipped – in a great many ways – to be a carer for his troubled wife.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA mesmerising blend of literary biography and memoir \u003cem\u003eThe Fragments of My Father\u003c\/em\u003e is a compelling and moving account of what it means to be a carer.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sam Mills","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47285405548693,"sku":"9780008300609","price":9.99,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0484\/3175\/9509\/files\/9780008300609.jpg?v=1776992194","url":"https:\/\/harpercollins.com.au\/products\/9780008300609_the-fragments-of-my-father-a-memoir-of-madness-love-and-being-a-carer","provider":"HarperCollins AU","version":"1.0","type":"link"}