Angelhead: A Memoir

A harrowing and beautiful debut, "Angelthead" documents with great emotion and candor the author's brother's descent into drugs, delinquency, and mental illness and how it all but destroyed both Greg and his family.Bottoms takes us from Michael's first psychotic break at fourteen years old through the petty crimes and delusions of his youth to the shocking crime that finally landed him in the psychiatric wing of a maximum-security prison. In between, Bottoms shows, in pitch-perfect prose and with great empathy and dramatic tension, the fragmenting mind of his brother as he becomes obsessed first with heavy metal music and the occult and then with the more bizarre aspects of Christianity. We not only see the effects Michael's odd and increasingly violent behavior had on his family, we also come to understand how the author, now a successful writer and journalist, used the power of language and storytelling to both save himself and forgive his brother. With the fast-pace and taut structure of the best crime novels and the moral sophistication and depth of our finest literature, Bottoms has created a book sure to attract attention. Not since Girl, Interrupted has there been such a powerful personal examination of mental illness and the devastation it leaves in its wake.

Review :
"I am on record as believing that any day is better when I am not asked to read another memoir. But Greg Bottoms's book caught my attention immediately and drew me in. I read it all in one sitting. I glanced up once or twice to look out of the window and to clear my head, and then when I finished I looked at the window again but it was dark outside. Which, considering what I'd just finished reading, seemed appropriate. "I would feel foolish in saying that the book is powerful and well written. . . . That doesn't seem the point somehow. Angelhead is direct, inventive, clearly imagined, and packs a punch. It is a book people will talk about -- perhaps productively." -- Ann Beattie "Angelhead is a cleanly distilled story of a profound family anguish. On every one of its two hundred pages there are sentences like arrows. The whole work has the beauty of hard, painful truth, arrived at through intelligence, art, and compassion. This is one of the most moving books I've read in a long, long time." -- John Casey "From the Hardcover edition.