A Room with a Darker View

An inventively told and wholly original memoir. -David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy Short, distilled chapters of quietly tantalizing prose grip us throughout the span of Claire Phillips' fully realized and haunting story of her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer with a mental illness difficult to treat and to diagnose. -Bruce Baumann, author of And the Word Was and Broken Sleep An engrossing story of identity formation, Phillips ultimately gives us not a confessional memoir but a parable of agency and resilience amid uncertain reality. As a speculative fiction writer whose work is rooted in an encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction, she crafts a tale of time travel, one where past-present-futures collapse into braided familial, personal, and social histories. Throughout the book Phillips illuminates the fierce reality of her mother's delusions as well as the tools she gives her daughter to survive her. -Connie Samaras A moving portrait of her mother and their relationship, A Room with a Darker View is a book that people who are going through something similar need to read. Mental illness is a story, like everyone's life is a story.... Many people don't want to talk about death or illness, they want to talk about the heroics. But I think some of the heroics are just telling these stories. In this book, Phillips' mother has a full life. - Emily Rapp Black, author of The Still Point of a Turning World As heroic as it is original, Claire Phillips' writing always finds the scary corners that would be secret to any other author, from which inevitably there comes into vision a revelatory perspective. Reading A Room With a Darker View, you won't shake it from your mind; finishing it, you won't shake it from your memory. -Steve Erickson, author of Shadowbahn and Zeroville