Roll Back the World: A Sister's Memoir

About the Book

Named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best 100 Indie Books of 2023

"Intricate and affecting, Kasdan's debut finds hope in the saddest of stories."
-Kirkus Reviews STARRED REVIEW

What happens to sibling relationships when your older sister, the budding poet you loved and admired as a child, falls prey to severe mental illness?When Deborah Kasdan's sister returns from a gap year in Israel, she dazzles friends and family with her sophistication and beauty. In three years, however, Rachel is committed to a psychiatric hospital. The diagnosis: schizophrenia.As the years pass, Deborah focuses on her own family and career but constantly feels shadowed by a sense of guilt, especially when a plan to help Rachel backfiresand leaves her hospitalized 2,000 miles from home. Eventually a poem Rachel writes gains her admission, against all odds, to a highly regarded community mental health program. After decades, she finally gains the freedom she has long yearned for.

Relating her older sister's struggle, Kasdan excavates its connections to family history and provides a poignant look at a mid-century Jewish family, especially during WWII and the Cold War. As she relates this history to her sister's life, she realizes how writing consoles both Rachel and her, and how it also connects them. Ultimately,Roll Back the Worldis a profound testament to the power of writing to heal.

About the Author :
Deborah Kasdan lived in the Midwest before moving to the Northeast, where she had a thirty-five-year career writing about business and technology. She has served on the board of directors of an intergenerational housing organization and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) for Southwest CT. She is a passionate swimmer and yoga practitioner, and a grandmother of four. During the summer she and her husband vacation near the great Nauset Marsh of Cape Cod and live the rest of the year in Norwalk, Connecticut. She is currently working on a novel based on her mother’s stories about growing up in Chicago during the 1930s.


Review :
2023 Foreword INDIES,  Finalist: Autobiography and Memoir

“The author delves deeply into memory and family dynamics to understand her sister’s diagnosis and, in doing so, finds self-forgiveness for being unable to save her. Intricate and affecting, Kasdan’s debut finds hope in the saddest of stories.”
—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW

“. . . a compelling and honest book about the many complexities that impact a family when the oldest sibling has a serious mental health condition. When her sister became ill, the family was without appropriate support or education.”
—Kenneth Duckworth MD, Chief Medical Officer, National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)

“Kasdan’s memoir thoughtfully examines the lifelong impact of schizophrenia on the family—both the complicated dynamics around making meaning out of the loved one’s experience and finding effective treatment within a broken mental health care system.”
 —Grace Cho, author of National Book Award finalist Tastes Like War

“Poignant and filled with unrelenting dedication to her sister's plight, the author sensitively narrates a family's search for alternative mental health care, the physical and emotional price it pays, and the sheer goodness of caring professionals and neighbors. Peppered with poetry and letters, this is an important memoir.” 
—Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone, author of Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma, 2020 Nautilus Book Award: Gold in Psychology

“. . . a riveting, courageous and highly personal account of a descent into madness and the mental health system's sorely misguided response. . . a window to a time when psychiatry was emboldened by the advent of new drugs that turned out way more harmful than expected.” 
—Peter Stastny, psychiatrist, filmmaker, and a co-author of The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic

“This raw, real and loving memoir spotlights the loss and responsibility felt by one family when serious mental illness strikes. It is told through the eyes of a sister who struggles to understand and help, but also live her own life while her sister, a gifted poet, disappears behind the symptoms of schizophrenia..”
—Randy Kaye, author of Ben Behind His Voices: One Family’s Journey from the Chaos of Schizophrenia to Hope