The Book of Malcolm: My Son's Life with Schizophrenia

Fraser Sutherland's memoir is about his son Malcolm, who died at twenty-six from a seizure of unknown cause. He reflects on his son's life, including his happiness, sufferings, and heroic efforts to calm his troubled mind. The book is a master's attempt to give shape and dignity to his son's life and create his own self-effacing memoir.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 200 pages
Publication date: 15 February 2022
Publisher: Dundurn Group Ltd

On the morning of Boxing Day 2009, the poet Fraser Sutherland and his wife found their son, Malcolm, dead in his bedroom in their house. He was twenty-six and had died from a seizure of unknown cause. Malcolm had been living with schizophrenia since the age of seventeen.

Fraser's respectful narration of Malcolm's life—his happiness as well as his sufferings, his heroic efforts to calm his troubled mind, his readings, his writings, his experiments with religious thought—is a master writer's attempt to give shape and dignity to his son's life, to memorialize it as more than an illness. And in writing about his son's life, Fraser creates his own self-effacing memoir—the memoir of a parent's resilience through years of stressful care.

Fraser Sutherland, one of Canada's finest poetry critics and essayists, died shortly after completing this book.

ISBN-13: 9781459749566