the midst of repeated breakdowns. The book includes snippets of many disturbing, late-night phone calls and publicly humiliating scenes. But Neugeboren also depicts Robert's intellect and idiosyncratic humor, qualities that Neugeboren admits he relies on his brother to provide. In one scene Neugeboren asks Robert why he has survived his breakdowns and hospitalizations when so many of his mentally ill cohorts have completely deteriorated or committed suicide.

"First of all," Robert quips, "I realized that God is black and that she loves me." But when Jay presses him for a more serious answer, Robert says, "I just wanted to survive and persist…. [I]t's like Faulkner said in the speech he made, for the Nobel, remember?—I wanted to endure somehow."

Whereas Neugeboren gradually assumes a parental role in caring for his brother, Tara Elgin Holley takes responsibility for her schizophrenic mother when Holley is in her late teens. Holley, who writes with her husband, journalist Joe Holley, traces her early maturity and love of music to her mother.

In 1951, Big Band singer Dawn Elgin was establishing herself in Hollywood, considering an offer from RCA Victor. There was talk, too, of a movie role for the aspiring 21-year-old actress, but suddenly Dawn departed for New York.

For months, her family in California heard nothing from their daughter. Then they received a telegram from Bellevue Hospital: "Your daughter is acute paranoid schizophrenic. Needs hospitalization." The telegram failed to mention that the unmarried Dawn had recently given birth to a daughter, whom she named Tara.

The only real information that remains about this period is that during Dawn's pregnancy, she began to dream of a dark angel. She continued to experience visions and dreams, mixed with bouts of rage, and soon her previous lifestyle eroded. Tara was raised primarily by relatives.

My Mother's Keeper is the brutal, insightful story of Tara Elgin Holley's attempt to decipher her mentally ill mother's relationship with the world. As a result, Holley discovers the unconventional ways in which her mother shaped her own identity.

By age 21, Holley had assumed full responsibility for her mother's hospitalizations, medications and transitional housing. This was no simple task for a college music student who also held two jobs, but she managed to keep vigil over Dawn, who wandered the streets of Austin, Texas, unkempt and often disoriented. Despite Holley's attempts to locate the most sympathetic doctors and hospitals, Dawn claimed to be happiest when she roamed the streets.

And despite Holley's strident loyalty to her mother, she admits to a moment or two of denial. In one painful scene, Holley is walking with a professor when she sees her mother in the distance, clad in urine-stained clothes. Holley panics, telling her professor she has to stop at the co-op, and ducks into a doorway. As her mother passes, Holley notes that her mother's fingernails are bitten off to the quick; blood has dried around the cuticles.

The moments of connection with her mother remain few but precious to Holley, who describes happily singing classical music for Dawn. But Dawn's enthusiastic response provoked both joy and guilt in Holley, who wondered why she and not her mother was allowed to pursue a musical career unhampered by mental illness. This complicated emotion haunts Holley later in her life, especially when she further hones her art and starts a family of her own. Dawn's crises never quite abate, regardless of new doctors and medications, and neither do Holley's (self-admittedly) improbable hopes that her mother will truly return.

For Clea Simon, the effect of mental illness on her family was doubly devastating; both her siblings were schizophrenic. By the time Simon was 12, her older brother and sister had been in and out of numerous hospitals, institutions and half-way houses. Simon was left to interpret her siblings' bizarre rages and periods of withdrawal and, later, to identify their effect on her own development. To corroborate her experience, Simon turned to other relatives of the mentally ill, members of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and to experts such as Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, author of Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual for Families, Consumers, and Providers.

There is comfort in talking to fellow siblings of the mentally ill, Simon says [in her memoir, Mad House], an undeniable need for peers among the perpetually disconnected. Simon, a journalist for the Boston Globe, blends interviews and medical information in this instructive but disturbing memoir.

"As siblings who have watched our brothers or sisters 'go mad,' who lost our peers to psychosis, we share a unique experience: Our brothers and sisters are the ones we were supposed to have played with, learned to get along with, emulated if they were older or taken care of if they were younger, the people with whom we should have navigated the shoals of growing up. But instead they broke down."

Beyond identifying common characteristics in the relatives of the mentally ill—dread, guilt, a fear of succeeding in one's own career and relationships—Simon admits to fearing the obvious, genetic legacy. Simon, 36, writes from a slightly younger perspective than Neugeboren and Holley, and she brings a wary immediacy to her story; she has not yet had children herself. She and her partner have consulted a genetic counselor, who said a child of Simon's would have a 7 to 8 percent chance of developing schizophrenia. Beyond the genetic fears, Simon worries that she would be overly vigilant as a mother, and that she would somehow damage her child by transmitting her old feelings of guilt and unworthiness. Though she has worked extensively with therapists, her memories and dreams often take her back to childhood scenes in which her siblings frightened her, as when her sister killed Simon's hamster by slamming the piano lid down on it.

Simon says her anxiety was compounded by her parents' sporadic denial of their children's illnesses. When Simon was a freshman entering Harvard, she overheard her mother saying that Clea was her only child. Several years later, Simon's parents would tell her that her 30-year-old brother died in an accident. Later she would learn that he had committed suicide.

Confronting her siblings' illnesses is a lifelong process, according to Simon. "As family members of the mentally ill so often point out," she says, "we have mourning without resolution."