Author Interview: Natasha Williams, author of The Parts of Him I Kept

The Parts of Him I Kept is an intimate account of a daughter’s coming of age in the face of her father’s schizophrenic unraveling. Williams investigates the limits of our medical and cultural understanding of schizophrenia while chronicling the shared burden and benefits of caring for a mentally ill family member. In the tradition of Michael Greenberg’s Hurry Down Sunshine and Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, The Parts of Him I Kept asks us to consider the ways mental illness is as much a social issue as a biological condition.

One cold night in April, Natasha’s father drove his car into the frigid water of New York Bay with her two-year-old half-sister in the backseat. Natasha was twenty-one. She was the one to walk him past the column of hungry reporters demanding an explanation.

The headline in The New York Post read: Back from a Watery Grave.

But Natasha’s experiences growing up with her schizophrenic father in the gritty New York City of the 1970s are not so easily captured in a single headline. How could she possibly convey the power of her father’s love in the face of this tragedy?

What inspired you to write your book?

I started writing when my schizophrenic father needed assisted living, it started as a missive to my family about our limited options and then about the colorful halfway house he ended up choosing and then getting himself thrown out of. I was encouraged to write the whole story of coming of age in the face of my father’s schizophrenic unraveling when I submitted an essay for review to James Lasdun.

If you have a business related to your book, tell us about it:

In writing this book and making sense of our lives I find I am more often than not met with other people’s stories about the burden but also the privilege of caring for loved ones who live between our world and an alternate reality. There’s a certain perspective you gain.

I’ve become interested in the work being done in the mental health field to use personal narrative and storytelling to make sense of psychosis and other forms of mental illness, I’ve begun talking publicly about the value of writing this story to engage that broader conversation.

What is a typical day like for you?

I have the good fortune of being able to write full time. With my book launch a typical day is filled with preparing for author interviews, and networking with writers and mental health professionals, because now more than ever it takes a community of colleagues to help bring a book into the world. I also spend a lot of time writing essays to highlight my writing and experience as a caregiver and to forward the work that’s being done using personal narratives to further mental health.

What do you most enjoy about what you do?

I love writing. The satisfaction of digging into an idea or a mystery and coming out with a richer understanding is a life well spent. And then there’s the revelations that come from other people’s reaction to the work and ideas that I find so satisfying.

What are some favorite books you’d recommend to our readers?

Literary creative nonfiction is what I mostly read. Jesmyn Ward’s “The Men We Reaped” and Michael Greenberg’s “Hurry Down Sunshine”, Justin Torres ” We the Animals” and Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous”. All these writers have a story to tell and write such beautiful prose. Ward reluctantly shared the story of the lives of four young African American family members she lost in her twenties, Greenberg had the intense challenge but an envious container of writing about the summer his 15-year-old daughter had a psychotic break. He brings remarkable empathy to the exploration of her psychosis. Torres set such powerful scenes of the feral pack he and his brothers moved within and outside their dysfunctional family. And ocean Vuong poetically explores ” how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are”

What advice do you have to offer our readers?

Figure out what your passionate about and do that.

What would people be surprised to learn about you?

That I didn’t have many friends in my twenties and thirties. In fact, one of the first writing projects I undertook was trying to understand the special quality of childhood friendships and what makes some of them so long lasting – in part I was looking to understand why I hadn’t maintained more strong friendships

What’s next for you?

I’m writing a braided narrative about my mother’s pension for crazy men and our cultural fascination with psychopathic personalities. Also my mother’s dementia and supporting my sister who cares for her has become front and central in my life and will likely be something I write more about

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