Books like Faces in the Water

I have been a reader for as long as I can remember, not going to say how many years that is, but it has only been in the last ten years or so that I started reading non fiction. I used to think that knowing an author's background was unnecessary, but after I now realize how much of an author is put into even the fictional books they write. None more so then in this novel. Knowing the background of this author in particular made this an even more heartbreaking read than the subject itself garnered. In this novel a young woman, once a school teacher loses her bearings, her grasp on reality and finds herself in a mental institute. We meet the other women, the so called caregivers and the ineffective doctors. The routine, the punishments, the cruelty, the EST shock therapy which was so feared, the different wards, the cruelty of many of the staff, and the sense of fear and hopelessness many of the patients felt. She would be let out under the care of assisted, only to find a short time later in another institution. The end threat, a lobotomy, the last recourse. The writing is so insightful. Every few pages I stopped to reread a passage, powerful, profound. As written to describe the feelings of this young woman, "And the days passed, packing and piling themselves together like sheets of absorbent material, deadening the sound of our lives, even to ourselves, so that perhaps if a tomorrow ever came it would not hear us; its new days would bury us, in its own name; we would be like people entombed when the rescuers, walking about in the dark waving lanterns and calling to us, eventually give up because no one answers them; sometimes they dig and find the victims dead."The hopelessness and anguish expressed so heartbreaking. A powerful, and absorbing read, semi autobiographical novel. Well worth reading.