The Outsider: A Journey Into My Father's Struggle with Madness

The extraordinary story of a young man's struggle to reconstruct his father's past.

A devastating mental illness with no known cure, schizophrenia strikes people in the prime of their lives. For Charles Lachenmeyer, its onset was a life-altering event. In 1978, Charles was a happily married professor of sociology who lived in the New York suburbs with his wife and his nine-year-old son, Nathaniel. He seemed to have everything: a promising career, a loving family, and a comfortable home. But underneath his sociable exterior, Charles' world was falling apart. Within a few short years, schizophrenia would cost him everything: his sanity, his career, his family, even the roof over his head.

In 1981, Charles and his wife divorced. Haunted by the belief that his wife and the CIA were co-conspirators in a plot to control his thoughts and steal his sociological research, Charles left New York, seeking refuge in cities throughout the Northeast. Over the years, he traveled from city to city, passing in and out of psychiatric hospitals, all the while trying unsuccessfully to return to academia. He continued to correspond with his son, but as Charles' symptoms became more severe, what had once been a close father/son relationship changed dramatically. In 1989, overwhelmed and emotionally drained by his father's erratic behavior and bizarre beliefs, Nathaniel finally broke off all contact, writing: "I can't live in your world, and you can't live in mine." Four years later, Charles was living on the streets.

This powerful story is the result of the author's painstaking efforts, upon learning of his father's death in 1995 and his time on the streets, to retrace Charles Lachenmeyer's movements in the years after he left the family, and to find a way into the alien world in which he lived. As Nathaniel Lachenmeyer gradually weaves together the scattered pieces of his father's life, what emerges is the compelling story of a son struggling to understand what happened to his father, and to know the man he became.

The Outsider is an unsentimental yet profoundly moving look at one family's experience with mental illness. Rich in imagery and poignant symbolism, and framed by the author's highly personal dialogue with the reader, The Outsider moves beyond more straightforward accounts of mental illness to create a suspenseful and moving account of a son's search for the truth behind his father's haunted, solitary existence. It is a beautifully written memoir of a father's fight to survive with dignity, and a son's struggle to know the father he lost to schizophrenia long before he finally lost him to death.