[.ca] Life Inside: A Memoir (ISBN 0743411501)

a brilliant woman:
mindy lewis is absolutely amazing. i was particular hooked on the first part of the book (there are 2 parts) which tells of her 'life inside' mental hospitals. completely spine chilling and a definite must read.

Personal growth from hardship:
In this heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking account, Mindy Lewis describes her life journey, framed by her experiences as a teenage patient in a mental ward. Her story is honest and open. As a reader, I could identify with her pain and her experience, even though it is quite different from my own. Many of the feelings she describes are universal, which leads me to question society and its definition of insanity. Throughout her account, Mindy feels "different" and "individualistic", most likely as a result of her creativity and ability to visualize and approach life in a less constrained manner. As someone who does not have a similar life experience, I can still relate to those feelings. The book is extremely well-written and vivid, with great attention to physical and emotional detail. The story moves quickly (over 30 years in 350 pages), with its main focus how the 27-months in the institution affected Mindy's life. However, the book also details Mindy's journey to understand her life, the world around her, her family, and how to create meaning from experience, going beyond "life inside". I highly recommend this book.

Path From Hellish Adolescence to Creative, Joyous Adulthood:
I'm a memoir junkie, and this is one of the most rewarding, carefully written memoirs I have ever read. Lewis insightfully describes each stage of her rich transition from searingly painful adolescence to self-actualized adulthood. I marvel at her narrative's double-voice: she accurately conveys both adolescent self-doubt and emotionally-attuned adult wisdom. Readers who will particularly appreciate this book include lovers of well-wrought prose, and people who feel impaired by something in their past, and cautiously optimistic about their chances of getting over it and/or growing from it.

Hauntingly incisive:
Mindy Lewis cuts to the quick with chillingly direct no-nonsense descriptions of an adolescent finely tuned to the chaos of her day. A must-read.

A woman comes to terms:
This remarkable work describes the harrowing, yet in some ways winsome experience of a remarkable child of the 60s raised in the home of divorced parents and forever rebelling against her 'perfect mother.' At the outset, Mindy is on her way to the institution that is to be her home for 2 1/2 years and most of this memoir is devoted to those times - a life inside with the others inside, those that are patients, those that are employees, and those that are the professionals. Mindy has gone through her medical records of those days and peppered her historical descriptions with the views of her psychiatrists as outlined in those records. The life inside is intimately and thoroughly described and one feels not only the horror, the bondings, and the feeling of abandonment, but the eventual resignation. Mindy will come to terms with her issues, her parents and herself as described in the life outside that is the book's second portion. She comes to see 'the other side'. The memoir is written with remarkable sensitivity and emotional candor.