Roll Back the World: A Sister's Memoir

by Deborah Kasdan

Overview

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 backfires and 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 World is a profound testament to the power of writing to heal. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647425715
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	10/17/2023
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	1,104,353
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

★ 2023-06-02
Kasdan recounts her older sister’s harrowing struggle with mental illness in this debut memoir.

When the author’s 19-year-old sister, Rachel, returned from a kibbutz in Israel, she radiated “beauty and sophistication.” Drawing on her newfound worldliness, she dazzled friends who stopped by the family home. Three years later, in 1965, Rachel was hearing “frightening voices” and was soon after diagnosed with schizophrenia. After multiple hospitalizations, Rachel died at the age of 59, 36 years after her first psychotic episode. Kasdan writes of her admiration for Rachel during their childhood and describes a family under pressure; moody and defiant, Rachel fought intensely with their parents. The author also conveys their trepidation about being members of a Jewish family with socialist values in the era when the Rosenbergs were executed for espionage. The memoir attempts to excavate the roots of mental illness and to come to terms with the guilt she felt for being unable to save a sibling. A long-term resident of St. Louis State Hospital, where the family felt she received insufficient care, Rachel was raped during her discharge to a boardinghouse. The family decided that she would receive better care on the West Coast, but the plan backfired, leaving Rachel isolated from her family. Drawing on her sister’s letters and poetry, the author attempts to “shine a light” on the “horror and wonder” of Rachel’s life, including “hospitalizations in open and locked wards,” “mind-numbing, tremor-causing medications,” “assaults in hospitals and on the streets,” and homelessness.

Kasdan’s writing is intelligent and probing. In trying to understand why one sibling develops a mental illness when another does not, she refers to the science of epigenetics: “High levels of stress during a child’s early years are believed to be a major factor in expression of rogue genes.” The author’s shrewd hypothesizing is carefully balanced with sororal tenderness, as when recalling her desperate plea to her sister: “Don’t leave me, Rachel. Don’t disappear into being crazy.” Kasdan’s inclusion of her sister’s poetry (which resembles the work of Sylvia Plath) offers an engaging first-person perspective on the stultifying nature of Rachel’s mental illness. In a poem entitled “Water,” Rachel writes, “I go down deep till bright waters / roll over and over / the sinking hulk of my body / covered by each wave one by one.” The memoir poignantly discusses how Rachel’s memory and poetry inspired the author to write as an act of catharsis. Kasdan’s description of how the act of writing now links the two sisters is profoundly moving: “When I sit down to write, I still hear the clatter of her typewriter ringing across the bedroom of our youth.” Although the narrative explores the unbearable pain of having a sibling with schizophrenia, it also recognizes how Rachel’s creativity was fueled by her illness and how that passion proved to be inspirational. 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