The Boy with the Topknot
A journalist learns as an adult that his father has schizophrenia, and pieces together the family story nobody told him.
Sathnam Sanghera’s memoir of growing up in a Sikh family in Wolverhampton. As a young journalist in London, he learned that his father and his sister had schizophrenia, something the family had never named. The book moves between his own story, his parents’ lives as immigrants and his mother’s endurance, and asks what the long silence cost them. It was first published as If You Don’t Know Me By Now.
Recommended by 1 Person
Dorothy Rowe
This is just a beautifully written and, again, painfully truthful account of a life. Because Sathnam has to admit that he lived in this close-knit family and he didn’t notice that his father was really very odd.
Interview · May 2010
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