The Bullet: A Memoir

Tom Lee's memoir, "The Bullet," explores his family's experience with mental health disorders and the treatment of mental health disorders in the UK. It is a deeply moving, clear-sighted, and poignant analysis of living with a fracturing mind.

Format: Hardback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 02 May 2024
Publisher: Granta Books

In August 2014, Tom Lee and his parents embarked on a journey to visit Severalls Hospital, a former in-patient psychiatric hospital that had been closed since the 1990s as part of a nationwide shuttering of psychiatric institutions. The buildings stood derelict and overgrown, but in the recent past, the name "Severalls" had become synonymous with dread and fear, as it was a place where the strange, deranged, and dangerous were kept away. Among those strange, deranged, and dangerous people were Tom's own parents, whose experiences at Severalls are chronicled in the memoir "The Bullet." The book is a poignant and insightful exploration of their time in Severalls, as well as the breakdowns and difficulties that led them there, often against their will. It is also Tom's own story of his struggle with his fragmenting mental health, a hereditary bullet he believed he had dodged, and the extraordinary physical crises that precipitated them. The Bullet is a deeply moving, clear-sighted, and enormously poignant account of the treatment of mental health disorders in the UK, as well as a searing analysis of living with a fracturing mind.

Weight: 316g
Dimension: 223 x 143 x 22 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781783785049