Life Inside: A Memoir

In this insightful and beautifully-written memoir, Mindy Lewis lets us in on her innermost feelings and thoughts while an adolescent inpatient in a psychiatric hospital in the 1960's--and afterward. She candidly recounts her experiences regarding her family, her problems, and what life was like inside a ward at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City. A panorama of patients is displayed in a crisp, no-nonsense style, with beautiful imagery and insights delicately woven throughout. The book is extremely well-constructed. Surely anyone under mental or emotional duress will find "Life Inside" enlightening--let alone encouraging and helpful. And for those somewhat more balanced, it offers much drama and insight too. Mindy Lewis opens her heart and mind as rarely shown and this book surely fills a gap in accounts of those who were "there" and back. All in all, this warm and poignant recollection is a testament to Mindy Lewis' unwavering search for meaning, truth and understanding, and her coming to terms; it is a bulwark of hope and perhaps redemption. Read it: you'll be touched for today and many tomorrows.

I'm a memoir junkie, and this is one of the most rewarding, carefully written memoirs I have ever read. Lewis insightfully describes each stage of her rich transition from searingly painful adolescence to self-actualized adulthood. I marvel at her narrative's double-voice: she accurately conveys both adolescent self-doubt and emotionally-attuned adult wisdom. Readers who will particularly appreciate this book include lovers of well-wrought prose, and people who feel impaired by something in their past, and cautiously optimistic about their chances of getting over it and/or growing from it.

This remarkable work describes the harrowing, yet in some ways winsome experience of a remarkable child of the 60s raised in the home of divorced parents and forever rebelling against her 'perfect mother.' At the outset, Mindy is on her way to the institution that is to be her home for 2 1/2 years and most of this memoir is devoted to those times - a life inside with the others inside, those that are patients, those that are employees, and those that are the professionals. Mindy has gone through her medical records of those days and peppered herhistorical descriptions with the views of her psychiatrists as outlined in those records. The life inside is intimately and thoroughly described and one feels not only the horror, the bondings, and the feeling of abandonment, but the eventual resignation. Mindy will come to terms with her issues, her parents and herself as described in the life outside that is the book's second portion. She comes to see 'the other side'. The memoir is written with remarkable sensitivity and emotional candor.