User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
A tough read. The opening pages of this memoir were so shockingly disturbing. A horrific tragedy of a mom who violently dies by the hands of her mentally ill son.
Everything is fine is a delusion. It’s a cover up for the ugly, fearful truth. The truth that surrounds this family whose son, Tim, suffers from untreated schizophrenia. Not because the family hasn’t tried. But because the system failed them.
A harsh look at what mental illness can do to a person. A harsh look that strips the family down to what ifs that may have changed an outcome. A harsh look at how a family can become fragmented.
This is the reality of a system that is broken. Of doctors who can only do so much if a patient isn’t willing to help themselves.
Thank you for sharing your personal journey of grief and forgiveness, Vince. There are no words.
Given the last year and half with Covid, mental illness has been brought to the forefront. A positive move but still miles away of ensuring more timely treatments and support for not only those afflicted but also for their families. Mental illness affects us all.
It just varies on the spectrum on where it sits.
Rating: really liked it
I don’t know where to begin with this book other than the blurb, “In this extraordinarily moving memoir about grief, mental illness, and the bonds of family, a writer delves into the tragedy of his mother’s violent death at the hands of his brother who struggled with schizophrenia. Perfect for fans of An Unquiet Mind and The Bright Hour.”
Mental health deserves our spotlight and attention. We can’t ignore it any longer. We need to reduce the stigma, so real life stories where mental illness plays a big part are beyond critical. Vince Granata is a skilled writer, and this memoir is highly readable even though the topics are heartbreaking but important. Vince and his family never lose their love for their brother and son. The complex catwalk of that love and the path to understanding and redemption is an experience I can’t even begin to put into words.
Everything Is Fine is a book to be read and discussed. It's a portrayal about the power of forgiveness in the face of immeasurable loss, as well as a testament to grappling with the complexity of mental illness in those whom we love most.
I received a gifted copy.
Many of my reviews can also be found on my blog: www.jennifertarheelreader.com and instagram: www.instagram.com/tarheelreader
Rating: really liked it
Audiobook….narrated by Sean Patrick Hopkins
….8 hours and 37 minutes
A painful memoir impossible to forget. (hard to put down)—
I applaud the authors bravery.
Sad as can be. 🙁🙁🙁🙁🙁
Well written.
Rating: really liked it
Vince Granata's memoir will leave you spellbound when you read it. "Everything is Fine" tells the poignant, painfully, seeringly honest story of what it's like to have a brother diagnosed with schizophrenia and who one day stabs their mother to death because of psychosis which convinced him of the truth of things not real.
Tim was one of a set of triplets who grew to be a champion high school wrestler with a truly normal childhood. But Tim lost his grip on reality during college years, convinced with paranoid delusions that demons were after him. The family did everything imaginable to support their increasingly irrational family member. Vince as the older brother relates the sense of guilt he retains as he details all the signs of madness and the fear of violence. Indeed, his guilt that he was gone out of the country at the critical moment unable to cope with Tim anymore.
Then, the memoir offers us glimpses of Tim's trial and the odd position Vince and the others felt with torn loyalties to mom or the brother who murdered her though not rational enough to be considered responsible. We learn how Vince continues to visit Tim and you hear the frustration at the system which failed to provide for those who suffer from psychosis.
It is near impossible to convey accurately what a powerful piece of writing this memoir is.
Rating: really liked it
5 painful memoir stars
Vince is the older brother to his triplet siblings – Christopher, Timothy, and Elizabeth. Vince’s memories are clear on the day they came home from the hospital and he shares anecdotes about growing up in Connecticut with them and his parents – both doctors.
The title of the memoir is a reference to something his mother frequently said but things are not fine in this family. Timothy has struggles with mental illness and they really escalate and he chooses to not take any medication as a young adult. He’s at Lehigh on a wrestling scholarship and nearly graduates. However, at home, things take a very dark turn and Timothy kills his mother and then turns himself in.
This memoir is the journey that Vince takes, researching Timothy’s illness – schizophrenia – and the path to reconciling his love (and forgiveness) for a sibling with the violence he committed. This quote was so powerful: “I love my brother—and—my brother killed our mother.”
Vince shares what it was like to go through Timothy’s trial and the impact on each family member. This was a very personal look into a family’s dark moments.
One fascinating part for me was reading about anosognosia, which is where someone is unaware of their illness, they don’t think anything is wrong with them. This was so well explained by the author that I feel I have a slightly better understanding of schizophrenia.
I don’t read a lot of memoirs, but the description for this one compelled me to read it as I want to learn more about mental illness and minimize the stigma. This memoir is well written, although very difficult to read at times. This is a book I won’t forget anytime soon and I think it would make an excellent book to discuss.
Thank you to Atria Books and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this one.
Rating: really liked it
Will stay with me forever. Thank you to the author who shared a personal tragedy with the rest of us. Hopefully the compassion and yet seriousness of mental illness is more understood
Rating: really liked it
This memoir is heartbreakingly full of tragedy. A graveyard of grief and stars. At some point, I couldn’t continue reading. I needed a break to calm my heart.
It is about a schizophrenic brother who killed his innocent mother, and his oldest brother decided to look for the answers and to be brave for his younger siblings.
Rating: really liked it
There are some things so unimaginable that they almost defy understanding. In this memoir, Vince Granata seeks to do just that; bring understanding to something unimaginable.
In 2014, his younger brother Tim killed their mother in a psychosis brought on by schizophrenia. Here, he tells the story of his family and their struggle to help Tim with his illness, Vince’s journey with his grief, and his path to come to terms with the tragedy.
Well written and gripping, this memoir is a moving account of Vince and his family and their struggle to overcome both Tim’s illness and their grief over the loss of their wife and mother at the hands of one of their own.
Rating: really liked it
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
This book is heartbreaking, horrifying, and very important. Vince Granata tells his story well. His brother's descent into schizophrenia is fascinating and scary. Its importance is great in today's world of misunderstood mental illness.
Rating: really liked it
The book follows the author's family's story and explores how they were impacted by schizophrenia. Most of the book involves his younger brother Tim who became ill right after starting college, and how his illness progressed over several years. There were many challenges to getting Tim the care that he needed. Tragically, he began having hallucinations that involved their mother and killed her. The book reconstructs how the author's family arrived at that tragic day and then tracked how they survived and grieved in the aftermath.
Clearly, there's a traumatic, emotional story here, but the way the author tells it is very gripping and vivid. I felt like I was there, all the details of his home and everything he discovered through his research. It's incredible how he made his tragedy come alive on the page so that I shared in his pain. I love how the author talked about his male friends organizing and rallying together around him. I don't get many examples of amazing, deep male friendships, not the kind of friendships we see in women's stories. It was amazing to see how the author's friends showed up when he needed them.
To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:
https://zibbyowens.com/transcript/vin...
Rating: really liked it
This book was a suprising emotional tour back through my own life (and that of my brother's) as well as Granata's life. So many similarities. Though my family has not sustained such a loss, there is still the ongoing loss of a brother whose mental illness, quietly and loudly, shaped our family. All the 'what ifs' and regrets and grief around what we all lost, what we continue to lose. It's so painful to face all of it, but that's what Granata works to share - the transformative power of facing our pain and fears.
It was incredibly comforting too. Schizophrenia is an insidious thief. Granta brought anosognosia (an unawareness of one's own mental health condition or that they can’t perceive their condition accurately) to my attention, something I'd never heard of but definitely experienced in my brother. He is MIA somewhere in the world today and my heart breaks thinking of his isolation and loneliness and how we have failed him. Granata has written a gift of a book to anyone touched by schizophrenia and I'm so grateful to have read it and taken time to sit with my own grief alongside this book.
Rating: really liked it
via my blog: https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
𝑰 𝒊𝒎𝒂𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒆 𝑻𝒊𝒎’𝒔 𝒑𝒔𝒚𝒄𝒉𝒐𝒔𝒊𝒔, 𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒏𝒐𝒄𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒏𝒂𝒍 𝒎𝒂𝒅𝒏𝒆𝒔𝒔, 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒓𝒆𝒎𝒆𝒎𝒃𝒆𝒓 𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒔 𝒎𝒚 𝒎𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓 𝒔𝒑𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒑𝒊𝒂𝒏𝒐 𝒕𝒓𝒚𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒕𝒐 𝒔𝒐𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒓𝒂𝒈𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒏𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔𝒄𝒂𝒑𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒉𝒐𝒘𝒍𝒆𝒅 𝒊𝒏 𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒅.
Vince Granata’s mother was murdered at the hands of his mentally ill brother, this is a brutal fact, but what makes this memoir important for society and keeps it from sensationalizing his family’s tragedy, is the exploration of what brought them to this point. We read the headlines, horrified, make assumptions but most people never go much further than judgement. Claudia Granata was a victim of her son’s psychosis but that doesn’t tell the story of everything that became before and after. That doesn’t inform anyone that Tim, too, was a victim of his own psychosis. Such headlines seem to exist in a manner that erases the dedicated, loving mother who did everything she could to keep her son’s world safe. Yes, Claudia was a highly educated medical doctor, as is her surviving husband Attilio, but even with their means and education their son’s illness couldn’t be managed, and they did try. The day before her death, she spoke to a therapist who warned her to make her son feel safe and ‘be wary’. Their fear was that he would harm himself, as he had threatened to before when the noise in his head became too much to bear. Sadly, she couldn’t have imagined what was coming.
Vince writes about the signs they all neglected to see far earlier than his illness began presenting, and his shame at missed opportunities as a big brother and son. Just as any of us would rake over our own fears of guilt in the aftermath of tragedy, he attempts to pinpoint the pivotal moment when one step in the right direction could have changed the outcome. By sharing his brother Tim’s mental decline, it may well help other families going through similar struggles. The reality is, there is so much we do not understand about mental illness in all its forms, especially schizophrenia, which in Tim’s case went unchecked. What can be done when a patient refuses their meds, because they think they don’t need them, because that’s how the disease presents itself? You think you’re fine, better, cured. What is a person to do who lives each day with a distorted reality? We don’t think about how our perception, yes all of us, creates our world- it’s easier to draw a line from the ‘healthy’ and the ‘ill’ instead of thinking we could ever have any commonalities. All of us base our reality on what our inner voice tells us, what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears, we just happen to have the clear functioning, for the most part, of measuring ourselves against others, which keeps us grounded. How differently would we behave, think, feel if we had voices howling at us that someone has abused us, or were demons? How would we react during hallucinations others don’t see but are real for us? Even if it presents in less threatening ways, the fact remains the such illnesses push the patient further away from others, even distrusting our own devoted, worried mothers. Much of the time others push those coping with mental illness away to the fringes of our world, out of fear or ignorance of the condition. Is it really a shock that isolation feels like the only safe haven? It is often in self isolation that the disease grows stronger, overtaking what grasp on reality still remains. Loved ones best efforts sometimes aren’t enough, it’s truly being between a rock and a hard place if a patient is an adult. You cannot force treatment, and the illness can cause paranoia, distrust of even those who truly have nothing but your best interest at heart. Vince’s memoir is not intended as medical research but aside from the patient themselves, who better than those who have been witness to the slow creep of the disease to give testimony?
Granata knows that mental illness still has a stigma, and that we can’t move forward shaming people who carry the burden of the disease. Why are we kinder to people who have visible illnesses? Why don’t we, as a society, understand that mental illness, though complicated and not fully understood, is not any more shameful than any other disease? Even people with the best resources, medical education are lost at sea in trying to help their loved one learn how to treat and manage their mental illness. With memories and stories of Tim we see him not as the monster his horrific act (while suffering psychosis, we must keep in mind) makes him appear to be but as a beloved son and brother who had athletic gifts and promise of his own. I read this as a mother would, there was never a point Claudia gave up. How do you arrive at justice in such a case, when everyone loses? This is not the future she wanted for her son, nor can anyone imagine she would want to see him demonized for the horrors of that ill fated day. What about the healing, how does Vince’s family and yes, Tim included, move forward from here? How does Vince remember the beautiful woman his mother was without the savagery of her final moments poisoning the past? It’s a question he had to ask himself. He cannot honor his mother’s memory without shedding light on who his brother Tim really is when not in the grips of psychosis because he was her heart as much as Vince and his siblings. I don’t have enough words to describe how much this memoir touched me. I know I drone on in this review, but that’s how moving I found it to be, and very relatable. My own son was diagnosed with autism at a young age and anything that’s ‘different’ changes how people treat you, I saw this first hand, even when people try to fit in. It is a daily struggle for him more than any of us. I also understand the scope of a mother’s love, the reach of her heart, her fears and hopes and that she is willing to sacrifice anything to help her children. I think of how my own grandmother had to navigate her son’s schizophrenia, he never stayed on his meds for long past release from hospitalizations. It affected the entire makeup of the family, it could just as easily be a story that could have happened to them. Today there have been more advances, but not leaps. Family has front row seats to the constant fight, it is a helpless, heartbreaking feeling. Vince’s brother was a collegiate heavyweight wrestler, but his fiercest opponent has been his own mind. Vince’s story does not minimize the enormity of Tim’s act, but it’s not a simple case. This memoir is about family bonds, grief, the realities and struggles of mental health, and tragedy but most of all it about about love and forgiveness. I don’t believe the description of Claudia’s end will be what remains with me, but the vision of a loving mother playing the piano to calm the storm in her son’s mind. Yes read it!
Publication Date: April 27, 2021
Atria Books
Rating: really liked it
I would rename this book "Everything is NOT Fine." I only read it because it was on a list of "current books you should be reading," which is usually an alarm for me to not be reading them, given my tastes; i.e. not of the general populace. It reminds me of a friend who's father killed his wife (my friend's mother) and then himself. Now, his son goes around on Facebook boasting of his father's past (work) and comments about "he's my hero," when the bald truth is that he killed his wife and then cowardly (some hero) killed himself. I keep silently saying, "Some day this is going to catch up with you and grind you to dust." I'm not a big fan of seeking help through phases of crises as they usually don't have anything to tell you that you don't know--if you have the courage to face it. Which my friend is not.
I wonder about this author. His schizophrenic brother murdered their mother, yet he lives, under lockdown. This is way too complicated to dissect in a simple book review. I've seen parents who will wear themselves down into a nub, dealing with adult children with mental illness. Somehow feeling responsible for this creature. The mother was warned she could be in danger. She went into denial saying he would never harm her. I guess he showed her.
His sister is a mess now, his father an aged shell. Yet he goes to visit his brother and keep that channel open, not wanting his brother to feel abandoned. I've seen "children" like this wipe family's out, not just through murder, but their psychosis, freewheeling spending, out of pocket medical expenses not covered, physical harm. I could tell twenty quick stories in this review, each a nightmare, and in the end? You have to make your choices. The author choses to remain in touch with his sibling, due to what? As he said, his mother would never see him married, never hold her grandchildren. In truth, he's been robbed, and do you stay in contact with the thief? I am sure many would agree with the author's humanitarian approach to all of this, but having seen it firsthand? Sometimes you need to cut your losses and close the door.
Rating: really liked it
This is a profoundly sad book. There is no happy ending for the Granata family. It is, however, a deeply touching narrative. Vince Granata does a super job of explaining just how difficult it is to have a family member with a basically untreatable mental illness. In his brother Tim’s case, it was only after an unthinkable act of violence that Tim was forced into what will probably be a lifetime of incarcerated treatment. Anyone who has ever had a family member with profound mental illness or intractable addictions will relate to the fear, the frustration, the sense of helplessness that the author describes. It was a satisfying book but it left me very sad.
Rating: really liked it
I was lucky to read this book in pieces as it trickled into the non-fiction classes at our shared MFA program. We all knew Vince had to write this story, and I’m so happy to see what a wonderfully deep and rich book it’s become.
