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Imprint: Vintage
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Published: 13/02/2020
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ISBN: 9781784709075
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Length: 224 Pages
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Dimensions: 198mm x 14mm x 129mm
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Weight: 182g
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RRP: £9.99
Let Me Not Be Mad
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A Story of Unravelling Minds
Let Me Not Be Mad is an immersive, virtuosic and provocative investigation of madness, love and self-destruction that defies categorisation.
'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian
'I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness' Stephen Fry
A consulting room with two people in it. One of them is talking, the other is listening. Both of them need help.
Throughout his life, A. K. Benjamin has found himself drawn to extreme behaviour: as a contemplative monk, an advocate for homeless addicts, a support-worker for gang members and for many years as a Clinical Neuropsychologist.
His book begins as a series of clinical encounters with anonymised patients. But with each encounter, it becomes increasingly and disturbingly apparent that what we are reading is not really about the patients – it is, instead, about the author’s own fevered descent into mental illness as he confronts his traumatic past.
'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest' Olivia Laing
'Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind' Stewart Lee
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Imprint: Vintage
-
Published: 13/02/2020
-
ISBN: 9781784709075
-
Length: 224 Pages
-
Dimensions: 198mm x 14mm x 129mm
-
Weight: 182g
-
RRP: £9.99
Reviews
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Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat
Guardian
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A mental-health memoir like no other … a genre-defying wake-up call of a book … compelling … clever humane … holding back a sly twist for the end
Observer
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Let Me Not be Mad is stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I’ve read. I read it in two sittings. Extraordinary
Olivia Laing
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A perfectly extraordinary – not to mention extraordinarily perfect – tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book
Stephen Fry
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Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka’s 'The Country Doctor', and you still won’t quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book
William Fiennes
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Brilliant and alarming, written with cunning and self-lacerating honesty. The doctor is sick, but his intelligence, his scope of reference, his damaged sagacity could save us all
Iain Sinclair
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Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths
Stewart Lee
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A treasure of a book. Intricately woven and deeply intimate, it reveals things that astonish, surprise and improve us
James Rhodes, author of Instrumental
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A truly astonishing journey into and out of the mind. Not content to pin you down with the intense intimacy of his storytelling Benjamin dramatises some of the most profound and intractable issues in neuroscience and psychiatry. I’ve never read anything like it
Professor Mark Lythgoe, UCL
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Like a meeting of Oliver Sacks and Hunter S Thompson … this is not a simple narrative of striking cases written by a far-seeing practitioner. It’s a turbo-charged race
Lisa Appignanesi, New Statesman
