What if your whole life was like a badly written play? Asinine plot, tedious dialogue, poorly paced performance, dreadful costumes. Would you walk out of the theater, or stay until the final curtain call, hoping it would get better?

This is the kind of decision our protagonist must make as she grapples with and chronicles her messy and lopsided life, from preadolescence to senior citizen, in a captivating memoir that often reads like a novel. Scenes From a Misbegotten Life features fascinating characters, bizarre events, impossible situations, even a bit of suspense. It takes the reader from the crooked streets of Greenwich Village to the Greek Isles, from the garish colors of Hollywood Boulevard to the ancient ruins of Rome. But this book is far from fiction. Rather it is a ruthlessly candid case history of a woman whose life has been marred by mental illness in various and surprising ways, not only as a sufferer herself but as witness to the struggles of similarly afflicted family members and friends. This is the kind of sickness that can be as plain as day, but just as often is subtle, insidious, and invisible to outsiders. Yet it plagues millions of our friends and neighbors. Perhaps it is time to take it out of the closet. Scenes From a Misbegotten Life pulls back the curtain and offers a vivid glimpse of what it looks like and feels like to wrestle with this condition on a daily basis.

The thrill of getting her first transistor radio, flipping baseball cards with the boys on the block, chalking up the sidewalk to play hopscotch with the girls, watching I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver on a black and whiteTV. Just some of the fond recollections prized by a child of 1950s-era New York City. Victoria Maiden was raised in a solid working-class neighborhood in the Bronx, at a time when America's future looked so innocent, so full of possibilities. The first member of her family to attend college, she looked forward to a career in publishing, law, or academia. But Fate had other plans, as painstakingly revealed in the pages of this unusual memoir. Today she lives by herself less than fifteen minutes from where she grew up, surrounded by books, music, and memories.