Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother Book

Molly McCloskey's exploration of the life of her eldest brother Mike, a once promising young man whose adulthood was devastated by schizophrenia, is a courageous work located between Mary Karr's Lit and Meghan O'Rourke's The Long Goodbye.

Molly was a child when Mike was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. By the time she was old enough to know him, he was frequently delusional and heavily medicated, living in hospitals or care homes or on the road. Then, when she reached the age Mike was when he became ill, she found herself drinking heavily and suffering from deep anxiety – and began to wonder about her own sanity..

Through reading an astonishing archive of letters preserved by her mother and grandmother, Molly began to piece together her family history and the story of Mike's life, before and after the illness struck. Circles Around the Sun is a work of extraordinary drama and intensity that sheds light not only onMolly's family, but on the myths that all families build for themselves.