INTERVIEW: MOLLY McCLOSKEY KNOWS the value of leavening the sad with the uplifting. It's a task easier said than done when the story is about her eldest brother Mike, a sweet, bright, athletic golden boy, and his descent into schizophrenia.
Yet Circles Around the Sunis no standard misery-lit memoir. This is mainly because the book is not about the author; it is more a stunningly nuanced exploration of a family's dynamics as Mike's psychosis comes to embody generational and psychological fault-lines. Three of the six McCloskey siblings – including Molly, her second eldest brother Steve, and another family member whom she doesn't talk about – are recovering alcoholics.
Any other Irish-American writer – certainly one whose drinking sorties finally hit the buffers in Co Sligo after a last, heroic, three-day binge in the mid-1990s – might have seen rich fodder here. And that bender is one of the most riveting chapters in the book. But when it came to family, she never lost sight of the big picture. All were consulted about the book, including Mike, and chapters were passed around for reading.
“For me it wouldn’t have been worth it to fall out with them,” she says today, confining herself to hot chocolate in the Merrion Hotel. There are no bogey-men here, no passionate rants, no conclusions. At its heart is the heroism of the mundane, gritty love of carers. The book is a 230-page love note to her mother, the fun-loving, stylish, unsentimental, Anita, whose life is lived according to the loopy song lyric, “It ain’t what ya do, but the way that ya do it”, and who has never allowed her children to see her cry. It is also a homage to McCloskey’s beloved Ocean City grandparents, the family’s lodestar in a peripatetic existence, as they move from state to state, dependent on Jack McCloskey’s fortunes as a professional basketball coach.
Jack is a character, an alpha male, blind to colour, prejudice and everything but how a person pulls himself out of his circumstances. Part of his job is to reel in high-school basketball hotshots. After waiting, eighth in line, to talk to one such puffed-up New York youth, he finds the kid sitting there, nonchalantly messing with a ball and asking: “Hey, coach Jack, what’s Wake Forest [University] gonna do for me? Whatcha’ll gonna do?” After a pause, Jack says: “You know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna stick that ball right up your ass.” Then he walks out.
Jack must have been so proud of his eldest son in those early days. Mike is 14 years old, just starting high school, when Molly is born. “Thin as a rail . . . serious, diligent, conscientious. At school, he is made Sacred Heart boy, the award bestowed on the boy who shows the best combination of scholarship, athleticism and good behaviour. He is also competitive, and in this he takes his cue from his father. His father is not in the business of raising quitters, pansies, Mary Janes. One of his mottos is ‘a winner is a loser who just didn’t quit’. When Mike goes out for track his first year in high school, he runs and runs until he is vomiting . . . ”
He is what they call “a pure shooter” in basketball and wins an academic scholarship to Duke, one of the country’s finest universities.
Molly has few memories of his "pre-illness self", only photographs and the reams of letters her mother kept. He is just 23 and she only nine when he is diagnosed with schizophrenia. His university days coincide with an era of rising militancy, Kerouac's road travels, when Be Here Nowby Ram Dass is the cool read, and drugs are everywhere. The bright scholarship boy turns from giggly pothead to serious experimenter with LSD. Meanwhile, "the act of tripping . . . had become steeped in expectations", says McCloskey, a "litmus test, revealing how evolved you were".
Mike, a “seeker” as she describes him, wants to find out what makes him tick. His closest brother Steve first notices him “behaving oddly” in 1973, “laughing at things he shouldn’t be laughing at, giggling to himself, speaking in non sequiturs”. Embarrassed, Steve shies away from him. Mike begins to phone home regularly, vague and fearful, talking about depression. Maybe it is related to the drug “or what it had left in its wake”, she speculates. Or perhaps Mike had “entered the ‘prodromal stage’ before the onset of schizophrenia, characterised by perceptual abnormalities (but not yet full-blown hallucinations or delusions), difficulty concentrating, a preoccupation with odd ideas, decreased emotional response, rapid mood swings, sleep disturbances, social withdrawal and depression”. Big maybes.
But even if he had been able to articulate what was happening to him, says McCloskey, their parents would have had trouble comprehending it. “Their son was young, healthy, intelligent. He was enrolled in one of the finest universities in the country. What could possibly be troubling him? When he spoke of feeling depressed, alienated or anxious, what they heard were the whinings of pampered late-modern adolescence. Neither of them had any experience of depression, and it was not the buzzword, the common cold of feeling, it would later become.”
She writes of his arrival at their grandparents’ home, thousands of miles away in Ocean City, covered in scabies and boils, and how they take him in without hesitation. “They stocked up on insecticides, steroid creams and antiseptic soap to treat his skin infections. When he passed the scabies on to them, they didn’t complain.”
By this stage, the McCloskey family home is cracking in two. There are hints of paternal infidelities. Jack’s job is hanging by a thread. A game is starting when a guy comes in, wearing a long army coat, unkempt hair and a scruffy beard, and Jack feels a tap on the shoulder: “We gotta get you out of here. We have to go.” He turns around and finds himself staring into the mad eyes of his own son. Jack blames it on the drugs. “It was a neat and simplifying explanation, one that allowed for the conclusive denunciation of all that he had found troubling about the last several years. The self-indulgent hedonism of the young. Their blithe disregard of the sacrifices of past generations. The way they ridiculed the country he loved while living off the fat of its prosperity. He looked at his son, down on his knees in the wet grass, and saw the madness of the last decade embodied.”
When Mike is found taking off his clothes in a church, he ends up in a mental hospital. “Gradually the expectations of him were becoming humbler, from the high hopes of the late 1960s to the day our mother wrote, after a ‘record’ week-long spell working at a local cafeteria some years later ended in his being fired, ‘I would rather have a happy bum than a tense worker’.”
But Anita’s letters to her mother are unfailingly upbeat. “We are amazingly happy despite our little reverses,” she writes in 1976, although her 28-year marriage is effectively over. Jack – about 50 now, with no job, shaggy 1970s hair and paintbrush moustache – is in love with someone else and wants a divorce. But to Anita, self-obsession is alien, as is regret.
Anita’s transition from “wifely cheerleader to reluctant divorcee”, the triumph of her sense of fun and curiosity, and that “unsentimental strength and matter-of-fact acceptance of present circumstances” is genuinely inspirational. She creates an atmosphere of pleasure and adventure for the children, staging treasure hunts at Christmas, sneaking them into movies and taking them for weekends to the mountains and the coast. Mike is around, sometimes experimenting at independent living, experiments that end with Anita cleaning rotting food out of the fridge and sweeping cigarette butts off the floor.
He interacts with no one. Anita is his constant, his one remaining friend. McCloskey is clear-sighted. While Jack tries to help with the more dramatic incidents – racing to the Rocky Mountains when Mike goes missing – “the more intimate, less obviously grand gestures were left to my mother. When Mike arrived . . . with boils and body lice, it was she who put on her bathing suit and scrubbed him in the shower. It was she who went for walks with him after dinner and on Sunday afternoons when not one of us was eager for his company. It was she who praised his small accomplishments: now he helps tidy the house, now he can find his way alone on the bus, now he showers without being told.”
Even so, the struggle to understand continues. His adored Ocean City grandmother writes to him in 1978, a loving but stern letter from a woman who can’t help believing that self-indulgence is behind it all. “You should have more pride and confidence in yourself. How many fellows your age, looks and education would act as you have done . . . It is all up to you dear Mike and we know you can do it.”
They are a “can-do” kind of family. At 53, after a few “drifty years”, Jack has become general manager of the Detroit Pistons in the NBA league, a job no one else wants. By the time he leaves in 1992, they have won two championships and have had several near-misses.
But it takes 31 years from the divorce for his children – apart from Mike – to reunite around him, for a celebration of his sporting success in 2008. In a speech, Tim, another of Molly’s brothers, tells a story of when he was 10 and went to basketball camp and was greeted by a nowfamous coach with a growling “you’ll never be as tough as your old man”. An outsider would have heard it as just another accolade. For McCloskey, it was “an unwittingly sad anecdote, a reminder of how deeply in my father’s shadow all his sons had felt”.
Who knows what the family would be like without Mike’s psychosis? On the positive side, it may have had a solidifying effect, spearheaded by a deeply-committed Anita. “But essentially, I think the prevailing feeling when we are together is that there is a hole, a space, a sense of incompleteness there. There is always a sense that someone is missing . . . In terms of my parents’ marriage, this is something you have to unwrap too.” And if she hadn’t grown up with Mike’s illness, would she have confused her own alcoholic paranoia and hallucinations with incipient insanity?
But the what-ifs peter out in the swamp of unknowns around schizophrenia. Can you "will your own recovery" as John Nash, the subject of A Beautiful Mind, claims to have? Can you learn to accommodate it as successfully as Elyn Saks, who became a professor in law and psychiatry? Is there at some level a choice? Did Mike give up because trying again became more painful than giving up entirely? Or are Nash and Saks the exceptional ones, among the 20 per cent with schizophrenia who come to live independently and hold down a job? And what of the medications? McCloskey describes them as "a hammer blow to the body . . . Depending on the intensity and prevalence of the side-effects, we may imagine they are preferable to the torments of psychosis. But they are an enormous hindrance when he rises to face the world each day."
Do they explain Mike’s decision to refuse contact with family members, and the particular cruelty of severing links with his 83-year-old mother for a perceived slight? Or is it simply consistent with RD Laing’s conclusion about the inner experience of schizophrenia – a kind of distancing, defensive survival strategy where, as Laing put it, “If the self is not known it is safe”?
“On the one hand, I felt I should respect his wishes and leave him alone,” says McCloskey, torn as ever by guilt.
But it would have been the easy way out. Mike’s company is not uplifting. He can be deeply cutting and offensively superior, displaying “a seeming total lack of emotion and regard – on the surface anyway. Some of us make more of an effort than others . . . So you’re there doing something because you think it’s the right thing to do and the person for whom you tell yourself you’re doing it really has no interest in your being there.”
She visits and phones him anyway – but he steadfastly refuses to speak to his mother. “I would have felt quite angry with him about that after all she had done for him . . . She was terribly hurt by it. I just kind of felt that at some level, he must have been aware of the fact that it would cause her distress and pain.” Her best guess is that he made a decision that the meetings were bringing him no pleasure and that he could just say no.
But where to draw the line between the nature of the illness and a person’s relatively conscious mind? McCloskey describes her parents as “groping in the dark” for explanations. They blamed LSD, depleted zinc, hippy culture, themselves, each other and sometimes, Mike himself. But they’re not unusual, even now. Although the illness affects some 1 per cent of the general population over the age of 18, it is still deeply misunderstood. Causes seem myriad and overlapping. Despite advances in neuroanatomy and brain imaging, diagnosis is an inexact science. Genetic predisposition is not the whole answer (if it were, according to McCloskey, the rate in identical twins would be 100 per cent as opposed to 40-50 per cent). Obstetric trauma, high fever as an infant, head injury, heavy drug use, and growing up in an urbanised environment, all have the potential to increase the risk in people with a genetic predisposition. Even maternal flu in the second trimester of pregnancy, when neurons are connecting, may also be a factor.
An area that clearly troubles McCloskey is that despite the research advances, such illnesses are becoming more chronic. Drugs can control hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia but not the "negative" symptoms, she notes – and it is these that primarily constitute the chronic illness and put a block on a normal life. But, fearful of "doing a Tom Cruise" (with his infamous recommendation that Brooke Shields shouldn't take antidepressants), McCloskey declines to go further and refers readers to a recent piece from the New York Review of Booksby Marcia Angell titled: "The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?" It is a compelling exploration into the subject of psychoactive drugs and their relationship with mental illness.
Meanwhile, the good news is that Mike is being well cared for by the maligned American health system. Between Medicaid and social security, virtually all the costs of Mike’s supervised housing (where he lives with about a dozen residents and social workers), food and medications are covered, supplemented by spending money from Anita. “He’s not institutionalised, he’s not living on the street, he’s looked after. If he’s not there, somebody knows to sound the alarm . . . It’s certainly not the worst-case scenario for somebody in that position.”
And at 85, Anita continues to follow the loopy song lyric. She has been very happily married for 25 years to a good, caring man whom they’ve all known since childhood. She gives bridge lessons, has had two knee replacements, continues to drive her car and feature prominently on the cocktail circuit. And she’s flying over for her daughter’s book launch.
Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brotherby Molly McCloskey is published by Penguin, £14.99/€17. It is reviewed on page 10 of Weekend Review
