Natasha Williams’s debut book, The Parts of Him I Kept: The Gifts of My Father’s Madness (Apprentice House Press,2025) is by description a memoir about coming-of-age in the midst of her father’s schizophrenic unraveling. Beyond that, it is a book about a girl turned woman yearning for and trying to understand love.
It is no secret that the United States is facing a mental health crisis, with one in six young adults experiencing a mental health disorder and an estimated one in twenty adults experiencing a severe mental illness. The Parts of Him I Kept illuminates how one family survived and found hope in the face of the extraordinary challenge—and Williams is careful to add privilege—of caring for a family member with schizophrenia while not losing themselves.
Williams and I spoke in person in Los Angeles, where we were both attending the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference in March and exchanged emails about growing up in gritty 1970s New York, deciphering fact and fiction from a father with a Messiah complex, and the sometimes unexpected places children find the most abiding forms of love. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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The Rumpus: A dramatic opening scene shows your father driving into a frozen Hudson River with your two-year-old half-sister. Around her rescue and death, there was a media frenzy. How did it impact you?
Natasha Williams: We often don’t see the day-to-day lives of people living with mental illness until their circumstances become headlines, proof that mental illness is dangerous. When the accident happened, they wanted the story of a mentally ill man who drove off a pier with his child in the back seat. I wanted to bring readers into this moment through the public eye and tell the story beyond the headline. Partly, I needed to understand what brought my father to that point, what the legacy of his mental illness had been and could mean for me and my family. Also, I wanted to bring readers into our world, to humanize living with mental illness. The accident showed so much about the danger and power of my father’s love.
Rumpus: What do you wish people better understood about schizophrenia?
Williams: Research shows that most mentally ill people aren’t dangerous or violent. In fact, their lives are invisible and segregated from the mainstream unless they make headlines. It would be valuable for people to understand that most mentally ill people are more a danger to themselves than they are to others. It feels more urgent than ever to talk about the people behind the diagnosis, about their humanity and the heroic nature of living between worlds and caring for those who do. I’m interested in the limits of our medical and cultural understanding of schizophrenia; the ways mental illness is as much a social issue as a biological condition. I spent ten years writing this book and asking who my father was. It wasn’t until after I finished the book and started to share the story that I discovered how many other people had a story to tell about their family and close friends who are living with mental illness.
Rumpus: One of the major themes of your book is the presence and absence of love. Can you speak to this theme?
Williams: I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the quality of my father’s love. Like a child, he saw the heart of people, understood what was important and what was really at stake. Despite his illness, he was a dedicated father. He cared deeply about imparting insights and protecting his children from the forces of evil he thought were out to get us. In the book I ask him what kind of animal he would choose to be: “An elephant, because they protect their young and they remember.” I imagine if my mother had been more nurturing and loving, my father’s attention wouldn’t have been so primary in my life. Would I have seen him as heroic and loving if my mother hadn’t been so emotionally detached and absent? The flip side of that is that if she had tried to protect me or shelter me more from his illness, I might not have had a chance to know him and be as close. It surprises people that it was my father’s capacity to love even in the face of his mental illness that made me want children of my own and helped me really understand that love is the most important thing a child needs.
Rumpus: At an early age, you watched Bambi. Perhaps you were not as alarmed by the infamous scene of a hunter shooting Bambi’s mother because “I knew one could survive without a mother.” How has your mother, her mothering style, and your mother–daughter relationship impacted you?
Williams: As an adult I’ve come to understand my mother is likely contending with her own personality disorder. In the book I grapple with her paranoid ideas about her family and the world, which made her feel unloved and unlovable. She felt criticized by her parents and she and I weren’t close—it was this legacy of emotional estrangement between mothers and daughters in our family that worried me more than the legacy of schizophrenia. When we had our first child, I was worried I wouldn’t know how to love her well enough. Luckily, I had a lot of mentors, surrogate mothers, and grandmothers who looked out for me. But it was my father’s dedication and love that has shaped my capacity to love and care for my children.
Rumpus: What do we expect from mothers that we don’t expect from fathers?
Williams: My mother was and is a very strong woman, and women aren’t valued for ambition the same way men are. Mothers are often shamed for pursuing their own aspirations and for not being maternal enough, even when they may be fierce advocates for their children. My mother wasn’t nurturing, and she wasn’t loyal or protective, but she encouraged independence and self-expression. She always said I knew better than her what was right for me and that was a powerful message.
Rumpus: Although they split up, your parents shared the belief that the individual is her own best judge. They enrolled you in the Free School, where children were encouraged to take powerful roles in many realms of school life, even including being able to fire teachers. You were often thought of as a little adult, which led to such situations as smoking pot at age nine with your father and his weed dealer, fending for yourself at a young age in the 1970s in New York, and being exposed to activities like hanging out with sex workers and going to the theatre with your dad to watch The Exorcist at eight years old. How did this mode of child rearing impact you?
Williams: I’m an early Gen X kid, and most children in that era roamed the neighborhood between school and dinner without supervision. My mother’s hands-off approach was an extreme example—literally letting me navigate from home to the store at three years old, letting me make my own decisions about which parent to live with, never censoring what I said to adults. My father also didn’t shelter me from the company he kept or the drugs he did. But there are other cultures that give children much more responsibility and autonomy than American culture. I appreciated my autonomy as a child and tried to give my own children as much freedom as was safe. I struggled with how much to expose my children to my parents. I wasn’t comfortable leaving them in my mother’s care, and I never left them alone with my father, but I wanted them to know who their grandparents were. I especially wanted them to experience my father’s depth of insights.
Rumpus: You felt yourself being “groomed” to step into a caretaking role for your father since you were very young. How did being thrust into this role shape you and what do you want others to know about caretaking?
Williams: My grandmother was remarkably dedicated to my father’s care. She spent a lifetime making sure he had services and a roof over his head. But she enrolled the family—and schooled me even, as a very young child—in caring for Dad in ways that cost each of us. In the book, I describe her [as] taking hostages to care for him. But also, she taught me the value and importance of standing by family when they’re in need. Living with mental illness makes it more important than ever to have strong family support. It made me a better person, understanding and taking care of my father taught me how to love more deeply and taught me patience I don’t think I would have otherwise.
Rumpus: Your own boundaries were constantly eroded by the adults around you, and part of your healing process was to practice “the art of leaving people who couldn’t function in the world.” A major moment of reckoning came when your father was struggling with crack addiction in the psychiatric hospital and his belongings needed to be moved out of his apartment, all fingers pointing to you to take responsibility for his few life possessions. Your therapist suggested you call him and ask if there was someone else who could. You said, “My worthiness felt so inexorably linked to meeting needs that were bigger and more important than my own. But his life’s undercurrent was straining to take me under. I couldn’t manage to take care of both of us in this instance.” How did this realization jolt you into putting yourself first?
Williams: Therapy and twelve-step programs have been essential for my understanding that I couldn’t take care of anyone else in a sustainable way without learning how to take care of myself. I was powerless to change the circumstances of my father’s life, but when I learned how to pay attention to my gut and take care of myself, I could have more empathy for him. The scene you reference in the book when he was in the hospital and asked me to save his paintings and instruments was gut wrenching for me. To not go felt like a betrayal to him. But I had to give myself permission not to rescue him at that point in my life and that act of self-preservation made our relationship stronger in the end.
Rumpus: How was your father’s care impacted by his financial situation?
Williams: My father never held down a job, didn’t have work colleagues or friends, and lived on limited Social Security Disability income. His care was limited by the time and resources my grandparents could offer. Dad was so vulnerable to being taken advantage of because the only company that regularly showed up were the drug dealers and sex workers he paid. On the other hand, both of my parents went to college and had family with modest resources to help them when they needed help. A lot of people living with mental illness don’t have those family supports and resources and end up living on the street or in prisons.
Rumpus: Near the end of the book, you reflect that while some people with schizophrenia are recognized for their brilliance (citing John F. Nash who received a Nobel Prize for game theory, featured in A Beautiful Mind), most are not. In the case of your father, there was a painful moment where you acknowledge that his many inventions and ideas would be relegated to the dustbin as you wondered if any of them may have been genius and if recognition could have improved his situation. How might it have?
Williams: I’ve been working on a TEDx talk about the ingenuity of mania. I’m considering the ways this country is built on the entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants and entrepreneurs who had the energy and drive to take risks, develop new approaches, and lead in new political and cultural directions. Political leaders like Gandhi and Churchill suffered from manic depressive illness and were change agents in our world. Research shows that schizophrenia, which shows up in one percent of the population, has some selective advantage in the gene pool, that outlier thinkers make communities and civilizations more resilient and more empathetic. Even if Dad’s ideas weren’t brilliant, the way he coped with his illness was extraordinary. I wish mental health care practices acknowledged the heroic effort of living between worlds and could be more curious about psychosis as a psychic call for help.
Rumpus: In a 2015 interview with Scientific American and elsewhere, John F. Nash credits not going on medicine and aging out of the disease with his recovery from schizophrenia. There are also reports of others living with schizophrenia having done the same. On the other hand, you saw the ravages of years of medicine on your father. Can you share about the long-term effects of medicine, how you saw your father self-medicating, and what impact you saw this having on your father’s life?
Williams: It’s thought that the symptoms of schizophrenia do diminish with age. I talk about the quieting of dad’s symptoms later in his life, in part because the psychotropic cocktail he was on allowed him to be functional and lucid at the same time. Schizophrenia, like so many mental illnesses, is periodic. There are long periods of lucid thinking until they are visited by mania or psychosis again and those symptoms are often in response to the normal stresses and transitions of life. For example, my father’s first break was at his college graduation. He also often lost his mind just before each of his six children were born. As we get older, the stakes aren’t as high, and perhaps this is why the symptoms diminish too?
Rumpus: Craft question: One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is alogia, or poverty of speech, where those affected talk less or use fewer words. Dialogue that is normally an essential part of narrative simply wasn’t available from your father, “a man of few words.” How did you work with this practical challenge?
Williams: So much of life with my father was spent in wordless uncertainty in the liminal space of his delusions and his coping. In order to fill in my father’s character and the gaps of my understanding of how I made sense of his illness as a child, I interviewed family members and friends to hear what they remembered him saying, how they understood their brother or friend in his heartless mania and in his abiding love. I used a combination of my memory and their stories to imagine and wonder about what he might have felt and what he would have said. I think this has been used for a long time but recently is being talked about as speculative creative nonfiction; a technique used to write into missing archives.
Rumpus: How have you seen treatment of severe mental illnesses change over the years? Where have we improved and what still needs work?
Williams: Psychotropic medication has come such a long way. For much of my father’s life, he went on and off his medication, in part because the heavy sedatives numbed and deadened his experience of the world. Now, more sophisticated medication targets serotonin uptake and production. Psychotropic cocktails address anxiety, depression, and psychosis in measured order. Also, models of care like OnTrackNY have documented the efficacy of a multi-pronged approach: family support, education, job counseling, and narrative storytelling make sense of and integrate experiences. This is a powerful model. I’ve learned that early diagnosis and support for psychosis is essential for helping people reintegrate into their family and community after a psychotic break. I only wish my father could have benefited from all that’s being done now, to combat the stigma and to encourage people to reach out for help early in the course of their illness. Interventions for individuals and families that successfully return more people to themselves and their place in their community are inspiring.
Rumpus: You say that the United States is “one of the worst places to be mentally ill.” Why? What do you see other countries doing that you wish the US would incorporate into our culture around and treatment of mental illness?
Williams: I read cross-cultural and biomedical studies to better understand the limits of our medical and cultural understanding of schizophrenia. It seems like people from cultures with more extended family networks of support fared better. Some European countries have more integrated models of housing, with special needs or aging populations integrated into subsidized student housing. Our system of separating and isolating people in locked psychiatric wards and prisons is particularly detrimental. There are other less restrictive models of care, such as the Hearing Voices Network where people learn which voices may inspire creativity and which voices need to be talked back to. In England, psychoanalysis is employed to dialogue with voices. In some cultures, those who live between worlds are seen as shamans, expressing the medicine and insights needed for their group in a given moment. It’s not that I think my father was a medicine man or prophet, but I think we can listen to delusions as a call for help to be listened to and contended with.
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Author photograph by Jim Smith
