In this book review of The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen (pub. April 2023), I’ll fill you in on what I think about this exceptional book.
I finished this book with a gasp at 1:14 a.m. last Monday, and I still haven’t gotten my head around it. This extraordinarily aching book has so deeply affected me that it’s still got its claws in me even now a week later. The Best Minds does that to you. It creeps into your mind. It winds its way through the ventricles of your heart. It surges through your brain, and it shines lights on the shadows between your neurons. In every way, it is a book that demands a reaction from its reader.
Let me back up a bit…
Book Review of The Best Minds: Summary of the Book
Let me kick off this book review of The Best Minds with a summary of the book. In The Best Minds, writer Jonathan Rosen traces his close friendship with his neighbor, Michael Laudor, across their childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Growing up together as boys in the New York City suburb of New Rochelle, both Rosen and Laudor were raised by Jewish families for whom the Holocaust was not-so-distant history.
Both of their fathers were professors married to supportive spouses; in Rosen’s case, his mother was a novelist, fueling literary ambitions not just in Rosen, but in Laudor, too. Both boys wanted to be writers one day. They worked together on the school paper in high school until the editor in chief job was awarded to Rosen. Upon hearing he’d been passed up for the position, which he had been in contention for, too, Laudor cut his ties and resigned. But the rift would not permanently rupture their friendship.
However, the lifelong competition pitting each friend against each other began to manifest. In Rosen’s case, this was a more conscious struggle than with Laudor, who seemed to not notice Rosen’s sense that the world of literature was not big enough for both of them. Not long after, Rosen and Laudor then departed for the same university, Yale, which Laudor aced and graduated in three years.
As Rosen drifted westward towards California for a PhD in English literature at UC Berkeley, Laudor was hired by the elite financial management company Bain & Company. Laudor excelled at Bain just as he did at Yale as an undergrad, but soon the pressure started to mount. Laudor began to develop bizarre behavior and exhibit disordered, increasingly more distorted thoughts, like the fact that his family had been replaced by Nazis. (A variation of a psychotic condition known as the “Capgras delusion.”) When Laudor brandished a knife and threatened his parents, his father convinced Laudor to admit himself to the inpatient psychiatric ward at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Laudor was diagnosed with schizophrenia and stayed for eight months.
Upon his release, Laudor was set up in a halfway house, awarded Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and connected to vocational rehab. Meanwhile, before he had been hospitalized, Laudor had applied to law schools. Accepted to Yale Law while he was at NewYork-Presbyterian, Laudor instructed his brother to write to Yale and defer his matriculation a year. During his stay in the halfway house, it was suggested to Laudor that he could perhaps, given his mental fragility and the severity of his illness, one day aspire to work as a cashier at Macy’s. This comparatively dead-end future, starkly different in so many ways than the high hopes Laudor had for himself, shook him to his core. He packed his bags for New Haven and, with his father’s support, matriculated at Yale Law School, by all accounts then and now recognized as the most prestigious law school in America.
And so began a new path for Laudor, who blossomed in the supportive community of professors, administrators, and fellow students. Recognized for his brilliant, if psychotically compromised, brain, Laudor became the darling of his cohort, with some of the country’s most esteemed legal minds working to help Laudor thrive. While it was widely believed among the faculty that Laudor could never hold down a full-time job as an attorney, they created a safe space for him to immerse himself in law. Laudor graduated and worked as the school’s first “post doc” research fellowship, occasionally guest lecturing on topics related to disability and mental illness, and how the law treats both.
When a New York Times reporter featured Laudor in an article for the paper, suddenly Laudor’s life drastically changed. Laudor was approached by a literary agent, who compelled Laudor to put together a proposal for a memoir, which helped him sell his book to a publishing house for an astronomical sum. At the same time, Hollywood called and purchased Laudor’s life rights to make a blockbuster out of his unconventional success in the face of adversity both internal and external. Laudor was suddenly a millionaire.
But as time mounted on Laudor to produce the book he sold, Laudor stopped taking his medication. Increasingly more unhinged, Laudor’s delusions came back, and they came back strong. Tragically, Laudor murdered his pregnant girlfriend, whom he believed had been replaced by a doll version of herself. Laudor confessed to the crime, and his lawyers successfully lobbied for the so-called “insanity defense.”
In the end of the book, Rosen visits Laudor at his current home, the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychotherapy Center. Together, the men bond over their shared past even as their paths ultimately diverged drastically. The closing pages are a melancholy meditation on the hopeless and haphazard state of America’s public health response to mental illness past, present, and future.
Book Review of The Best Minds: What I Loved
I think it’s so important in this book review of The Best Minds to note the subtitle: the tragedy of good intentions. This was one of the best parts about this book, how Rosen manages to situate Laudor’s condition within the context of the greater community of people who championed Laudor.
Michael Laudor flourished at Yale Law and at home in New Rochelle, where he had long found refuge among his friend’s family and network of psychiatrists, because well-intentioned people believed he was the inspirational, if tortured, genius who they believed him to be.
One of the things that Rosen makes clear is that Laudor managed to easily, if unintentionally, convince these supporters that he was healthier than he actually was.
At one point, the editor assigned Laudor’s case comes out to meet him at his new apartment on Long Island. They tape an interview meant to help prompt Laudor to begin making significant progress on the memoir. Later, the editor shares the transcript of the conversation with his dying father-in-law, a celebrated expert on schizophrenia and the family, whose reaction is telling: “I don’t believe it….He’s either faking it, or he’s much sicker than he’s letting on” (p. 393).
People looked at Michael Laudor and saw who they wanted to see: a brave and courageous young man who flourished most when he was soaring over the low expectations they set for him. They did not want him to fail. They wanted him to be the model mentally ill icon he could only ever fail to be. Laudor’s success was seen as emblematic of the promise of psychiatry. Laudor became the poster boy for the hopes and dreams of those who were mentally impaired but less functional. If Laudor could excel outside the hospital and institution and reach the pinnacle of prestige, so, too, could others.
The problem was nobody was really examining the car to check the breaks. Laudor murdered Carrie. He crashed and diverged permanently off the course of mental wellness that others had prescribed for him. Indeed, he was much sicker than he was letting on. But, also, people saw Laudor through the filter of hope, promise, and success that he could never truly live up to. In the end, he went off his meds, killed his girlfriend, and was put behind bars for life in a corrections institute for the criminally insane.
I kind of know how those expectations feel; I have schizoaffective disorder bipolar type, which, in plain English, means I meet the full qualifications for both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Like Laudor, I sometimes have (mercifully nonviolent) delusions and sometimes suffer from negative symptoms (which show up as a flat affect, a poverty of speech, and a lack of enjoyment of my daily life, etc.).
I, too, know how it feels to be pressured into wellness. Looking objectively, I’m bright like Laudor; I graduated from an Ivy League institution, too, while also dealing with the worst of my symptoms. And I know how much we as a society want the narrative that the mentally ill can do everything that others can do.
People have told me before that, by being public about my struggles with mental illness, I’m courageous or brave or inspiring. Maybe. To me it is a coping mechanism, to try to break the stigma and just speak honestly about my condition. But I don’t want to be anyone’s inspiration porn. Yes, I have a disability. Yes, I have a mental illness. No, I don’t want to be the model mentally ill. I’m sick, yes, but I sometimes fuck up like anyone trying to manage a major mental illness. Sometimes I forget to get my meds refilled on time and make mad dashes to CVS to pick up a prescription five minutes before they close. Sometimes I stay up later than I should and know I’m tempting fate, seeing as less sleep means more symptoms. Sometimes I have too much caffeine knowing it could send me into the seductive bliss of hypomania.
In other words, my daily reality is not all hashtags for #MentalHealthAwareness. The truly ugly stuff? I hide it. I don’t share my worst days on social media. I’m all-too-aware that I beg sympathy because I’m seen as “responsible,” but that’s a synonym for “compliant” and “obedient,” which I qualify for as a “good patient.”
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the support from friends, family, allies, and people I’ve never met except online. I want to succeed in spite of my setbacks. But I know how crushing the hopes and expectations of others can be. This is why I connected so strongly with the “good intentions” that crushed Michael Laudor as Rosen reports.
This was a scary book to read. I’ve to-date never had a complete psychotic break. I’ve been lucky that my delusions have never totally eclipsed my insight and sunk me. But I’m all too aware that if I stop taking my medication, bad shit could go down. Laudor’s paranoid delusions, by heartbreaking example, are a reminder of what might lie on the other side of my brain if I don’t tend to it well. This book therefore both worked as a sobering cautionary tale about what I’m up against if I fail to be “responsible,” “compliant,” and “obedient.” Fortunately, I am set up for success in that respect: I have a supportive family, helpful friends and allies, an excellent psychiatrist/therapist, health insurance, a stable home situation, a roof over my head, two cats, and, most important, the willpower to keep swallowing pills even when I think I’m doing too well to be really sick.
I am not Michael Laudor. But maybe I could be. And that scares the shit out of me enough that I’m going to keep taking care of myself.
Book Review of The Best Minds: Conclusion
In this book review of The Best Minds, I want to commend Rosen on his unflinching message. In the end, Rosen’s book makes a compelling case for America’s tragic failure of its mentally ill.
After the de-institutionalization movement in the mid-to-late twentieth century, the community mental health system that was supposed to be in place to care for the millions of mentally ill never materialized. As a result, homelessness soared and people like Michael Laudor fell through the cracks. While the oft-maligned mental institutions closed, today the inpatient psychiatry world has allowed for fewer and fewer beds for those in crisis. We have to be better.
The story of The Best Minds is 524 of the quickest pages you’ll ever encounter. This book makes a significant contribution to the literature of mental illness and narrative medicine. It is a book that is both hopeful, jarring, and a powerful testament to the people who will never give up on their mentally ill loved ones.
Book Review of The Best Minds: Further Reading
Let’s close out this book review of The Best Minds with some suggestions for further reading. If you’re looking to read more on schizophrenia, I encourage you to check out my other article here on this blog about the 20 best books about schizophrenia:
This list includes a variety of books on schizophrenia, from memoirs to family guides to workbooks and more.
Book Review of The Best Minds: Get the Book
And there you have it, my book review of The Best Minds! If you’re interested in reading The Best Minds, get it on Amazon and add it on Goodreads.
