Like Crazy

Starred review from March 9, 2020
Mathews (Committed), a PETA executive, lovingly and hilariously recounts sharing his Portsmouth, Va., Victorian house with Perry, his ailing 79-year-old mother. In 2008, the 46-year-old party- and travel-loving Mathews moves his manic depressive mother in, despite being hesitant about their relationship and his romantic future (“Who’ll want a frantic vegan with a bad back, a deaf mother who hears voices, and a nineteenth-century money pit with an underwater mortgage?”). But the arrangement is a joyful one for a couple years: Mathews still dates—except now it’s not party boys, but “men who love Home Depot”—and meets Jack, who’s just coming out after years of marriage and eventually joins the household. Then Perry experiences a psychotic breakdown and is treated for previously undetected schizophrenia. She eventually tells Mathews and Jack that “I have to go... I just wish I could keep going awhile longer now.” Perry, who had always dreamed of being a ballerina, dies just before Christmas 2012, and Mathews spreads her ashes in the snow outside of a local Nutcracker performance. Mathews conveys potentially heavy and gut-wrenching family crises with page-turning style and heaps of wit. This tender, beautifully written celebration of familial love will resonate with readers.

April 1, 2020
Mathews, the senior vice president for PETA, chronicles how caring for his feisty septuagenarian mother led to the discovery that she suffered from undiagnosed mental illness. When the author's mother, Perry, developed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, he brought her to live with him in Virginia. A self-identified "gadabout," Mathews worried about his decision. A quirky loner, Perry had a history of erratic behavior, and the author was profoundly uncertain he could manage the responsibility of caretaking. But from the moment she arrived, his footloose gay bachelor life not only stabilized, but also became more colorful. His friends--as well as readers of his first memoir, Committed--adored her sass and "avant-garde, pro-homo" attitudes. However, in addition to COPD, Perry suffered from heart problems, incipient deafness, chronic arthritis, and balance problems that sometimes caused her to fall. On occasion, she also heard voices. At first, Mathews believed that these sounds were the result of drug interactions and helped his mother cut back on her medication. Meanwhile, the author began coming into his own as the adult he never thought he could become, settling into a relationship with a man newly emerged from a heterosexual marriage. Perry's moods continued to darken, and she began struggling with the proliferation of the voices in her head. A psychotic break forced Mathews to commit her to a mental hospital, where doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia. He continued to care for her until she died, seeing in her not a "tragic victim" but a "weary survivor" who single-handedly raised three successful children without ever "succumb[ing] to drugs or booze or violence." A playful and humane writer, Mathews drolly examines parent-child role reversals as he meditates on the meaning of watching a beloved parent come to terms not only with mortality, but also a devastating illness. Poignant, readable, and even fun despite the dark moments.

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May 15, 2020
When Mathews' (Committed, 2007) feisty, 78-year-old mother, Perry, moves into his home in Virginia, he expects to have to change his freewheeling ways. He doesn't expect to deal with her undiagnosed mental illness. Perry has maintained the self-reliance and bawdy sense of humor that helped her through multiple foster homes as a child. When she first moves in with Mathews, they throw parties, go to concerts, and generally enjoy one another's company (especially after adjusted medication improves Perry's balance following multiple falls). As Mathews becomes more of a homebody?not only to take care of Perry, but because he begins seriously dating a recently divorced, newly out-of-the-closet man?he notices strange behaviors from Perry, including paranoia, depression, and conversations with imaginary folks. He ultimately has to commit her to a mental hospital, where she gets much needed help and a surprising diagnosis. Mathews writes of many scary moments with his mother, but their shared sense of humor shines through in his writing, making this a funny, sweet, and hopeful memoir.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2020

Director of Campaigns for PETA, Mathews claims that being constantly beaten up in high school because he was gay made him tough enough to be an animal activist, and in adulthood he was tough enough to bring his independent-minded, outrageously outspoken 79-year-old mother cross-country to live with him in Portsmouth, VA. But it took a fisticuffs-fraught trip to the emergency room for him to learn that she had long suffered from undiagnosed schizophrenia. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

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