About this item
Award-winning novelist and poet Gayle Brandeiss wrenching memoir of her complicated family history and her mothers suicide. Gayle Brandeiss mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant at her chest, and a grieving daughter trying to piece together what happened, who her mother was, and all she had and hadnt understood about her.. Around the time of her suicide, Gayles mother had been working on a documentary about the rare illnesses she thought ravaged her family: porphyria and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. In The Art of Misdiagnosis, taking its title from her mothers documentary, Gayle braids together her own narration of the charged weeks surrounding her mothers suicide, transcripts of her mothers documentary, research into delusional and factitious disorders, and Gayles own experience with misdiagnosis and illness (both fabricated and real) . Slowly and expertly, The Art of Misdiagnosis peels back the complicated layers of deception and complicity, of physical and mental illness in Gayles family, to show how she and her mother had misdiagnosed one another.. Gayles memoir is both a compelling search into the mystery of ones own family and a life-affirming story of the relief discovered through breaking familial and personal silences. Written by a gifted stylist, The Art of Misdiagnosis delves into the tangled mysteries of disease, mental illness, and suicide and comes out the other side with grace.
About the Author
Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne) and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins) , which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement (judged by Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, and contest founder Barbara Kingsolver) , Self Storage (Ballantine) , Delta Girls (Ballantine) , and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt) , which received a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a state wide read in Wisconsin. Her most recent books include the poetry collection, The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Press) the memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother's Suicide (Beacon Press) and the novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns: The Victims of Countess Bathory Speak in Chorus (A Testimony) (Black Lawrence Press) . Her essays, poems and short fiction have been widely published in venues such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Longreads, O, The Oprah Magazine, and more, and have received numerous honors, including a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award, the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award, and Notable mentions in The Best American Essays 2016 and 2019. She teaches in the BA and low residency MFA programs at Sierra Nevada College, where she was named Distinguished Visiting Professor/Writer in Residence, and the low residency MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Gayle served as Inlandia Literary Laureate from 2012-2014 and was deemed a Writer Who Makes a Difference by The Writer Magazine. She lives in North Lake Tahoe.
