Link to the Book Surviving Schizophrenia: A Tale of Sound and Fury

Hi Everybody

I have been trying to post a link to the book. I am not having much luck. So the best I can say is, please Google it. If you go to Amazon.co.uk (or Amazon.com in the USA) you will see a book entitled Surviving Schizophrenia: A Tale of Sound and Fury by Louise Gillett. That's me on the front cover! Sorry, it's only available as an e-book right now. If you have an ipod Touch or iphone or a Kindle reading device you can download the first seven and a half chapters free and see if you like it.

We (Paul and I) are going to get the paper version out as soon as we can manage. Amazon have a print on demand service, but I don't want to set the price too high and if you don't set it above a certain rate you actually lose money on each copy... So we may just print a couple of hundred copies or so as soon as we can afford to. Will keep you posted.

Hopefully, Paul will help me to improve the links to the book on this blog over the next few days and weeks. (I have set up a Twitter page, still in its infancy, and intend to do MySpace etc). I was greatly encouraged by the fact that a schoolfriend (who I haven't seen for at least twenty years) messaged to say that she read the book in two hours and loved it. My main concern in the last 24 hours has been whether the writing would stand up to scrutiny (because the rest of people's reactions are out of my hands). I want to be known as a writer, not as someone who suffered and wrote a book about recovery.

Which is also something I've been turning over in my head the last day or so - that the book is not enough about recovery. It is my story, up to and including the birth of the children, but the last few chapters do speed through the matter of how I got to the point where I am now. The point where you would be hard pushed to tell me apart from any other middle class Mum etc...

Well, maybe if enough people are interested, in another ten years or so I will elaborate on all that. Because partly I was lucky. Partly I was stubborn. I don't know - I don't have all the answers, and regular readers of this blog will know that I still have moments of self-doubt. Recovery is an on-going process perhaps. I am medication-free, I love my life, but I can never say that I will never be mentally ill again. But then nobody knows what life has in store for them...

I have been worrying about my Mum. I do hope that I get across in the book what a special person she is. I know she will be hurt that I have written about her alcoholism. She has always been such a private person. I don't blame her for anything that happened to me. She did her best, despite the drink.

Mum was the only person in or outside my family who never believed I had schizophrenia. A nurse told me Mum was in denial, that it was a problem parents often have with mental illness, that she should recognise what was wrong with me. But actually, I am proud of my Mum for believing in me, for trying to tell me that there was hope.

In one passage in the book I write about how Mum went to work (as night sister in a nursing home) drunk. I feel rotten about divulging that. But it is the truth and the truth is important for many reasons. And if anybody is tempted to judge my Mum, they need to know that she had no choice over her actions - she was in the grip of an illness.

If you hadn't all guessed - Mum hasn't read the book yet! She doesn't even know it is published yet! I am terrified!

I am hoping to see her later on today, because obviously I need to talk to her about this before anybody else does. I hope she will understand that I had to write about her because she is part of my story. But that I love her immensely and always have, and I am grateful to her for everything - for giving me life, for doing her best.

Anyway, on a different note, I went to my first lesson in the Alexander Technique today. Thanks again Rossa Forbes, for your blog 'Holistic Recovery from Schizophrenia' which I chanced across the other day and which has already led me in an interesting new direction.

Louise (feels weird writing my name here!) x.

PS for several days now these posts have not has spaces between the paragraphs again. This is because it won't publish a post unless I go to 'Eidt Posts' and publish from there, and then it changes the format. Aplologies if it makes the posts harder to read. I will try to get hubby to help me with that later too.