Asylum

Asylum is a work of memoir regarding the two years I was institutionalized as a teenager in a large psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. This is largely a work of nonfiction, involving memory and emotion as well as both subjective and objective references. I have also included some poetry, references to authoritative texts, and news articles about the institution. There is one expressly fictional piece: a short story titled “A Good Life” , involving my final days at the institution. The time frame and some of the characters in the story are compressed, to try to impose a more formalistic narrative structure onto an overwhelming experience. Nearly all events in the story, however, are true.