Rescuing Patty Hearst: Growing Up Sane in a Decade Gone Mad

In the spring of 1974, I was eight years old. Every morning I walked about a mile to school, through city neighborhoods and crossing three busy streets, including one six-lane highway. Every afternoon I walked back. Now, my mother and I just shake our heads at the folly of it. But it was a different world back then. A safer world where a little girl could walk to school without the fear of drugs, violence or being snatched by strangers.

In the spring of 1974, Virginia Holman was also eight years old, and one morning while I was probably tripping blithely towards school, she and her little sister were packed into the family car by her mother. But while everything was right in my world, young “Gingie” could sense that things were not show more right in hers. Her mother was happy, ecstatic even, about the prospect of going to the family cottage on the Virginia Peninsula. She seemed filled with a sense of mission, which made sense since she believed that she had been inducted into a secret army and given orders to turn the cottage into a field hospital in preparation for an imminent war. As I would have been negotiating the six-lane highway that lay between me and my second grade class, Gingie was negotiating with a mother held in the thrall of a full-blown psychotic episode. For the next three years, while family, friends and neighbors turned a blind eye to the situation, she helped her mother make preparations, endured “night maneuvers,” and took care of the baby sister her mother had all but forgotten. Her mother’s mission required that all the windows in the cottage be painted black. Gingie’s mission was to cope with her mother’s paranoid and delusional reality. . .read full review show less

This was such a sad book. I would have loved to have taken Gingie and her sister to live in my house if i had been her aunt!

Mental diseases are a traumatic illness for all who are involved.

But, I am glad I read this book, it helped me so much to be more tolerant of others because you don't know what their life consists of.

Thanks Virginia Holman for sharing your story and thanks to GGirls for putting this in one of your episodes to make me curious about it!

I thought this book was extremely interesting and also very saddening because, as it is written by the family’s older daughter, the reader gets a glimpse into how schizophrenia affects both the person who is diagnosed with the condition and the people who love and surround the individual. The daughter finds that she is able to connect with her mother less and less until she is forced to choose between having nothing to share with her mother or being a part of her mother’s delusions.