The Parts of Him I Kept

<p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The work offers a welcome wealth of insights into the challenges of living with mental illness. An engrossing debut memoir. - <em>Kirkus Editors Pick </em></strong></p><p></p><p><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Best Books of 2025 of the Hudson Valley</strong><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> by Chronogram Magazine</span></p><p></p><p><strong style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Winner of 2026 PenCraft Book Award for Nonfiction Memoir.</strong></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Natasha Williams has written an extraordinary memoir of growing up with a schizophrenic father ... as emotionally wrenching (and occasionally terrifying) as you would expect but it is also funny wise beautifully observed and astonishingly tender. -James Lasdun Author of </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Victory</em></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Read the first thirty pages of </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Parts of Him I Kept</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> and I bet you would cancel your own wedding to read the rest of it. Natasha Williams has a hell of a story to tell and she writes like an angel. -Abigail Thomas Author of </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Still Life at Eighty</em></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>One cold night in April Natasha William's father drove his car into the frigid water of New York Bay with her two-year-old half-sister in the backseat. Natasha was twenty-one. She was the one to walk him past the column of hungry reporters demanding an explanation.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The headline in </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The New York Post</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> read: </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Back from a Watery Grave</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>But Natasha's experiences growing up with her schizophrenic father in the gritty New York City of the 1970s are not so easily captured in a single headline. How could she possibly convey the power of her father's love in the face of this tragedy?</span></p><p></p><p><strong style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>William's memoir is an intimate account of a daughter's coming of age in the face of her father's schizophrenic unraveling.</strong><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> Williams investigates the limits of our medical and cultural understanding of schizophrenia while chronicling the shared burden and benefits of caring for a mentally ill family member. In the tradition of Ocean Vuong's </span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous</em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> and Robert Kolker's</span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> Hidden Valley Road </em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>this</span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </em><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>is one family's story that asks us to consider the ways mental illness is as much a social issue as a biological condition and illuminates ways we find hope and even thrive in the face of the extraordinary challenge of mental illness</span><em style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>.</em></p>