In The Eden Express, Mark Vonnegut, son of the great Kurt Vonnegut, describes his struggles with schizophrenia and the eventual recovery from the illness.

We follow, in a somewhat non-linear fashion, the events in Mark Vonnegut's life from his June 1969 graduation from Swarthmore College, through a short period of employment, to the 1970 journey with his girlfriend to British Columbia. These were turbulent, post-Sixties times, with the nation involved in and divided by the Vietnam War. Several other Swarthmore graduates join Vonnegut and his girlfriend, find a barely accessible yet beautiful piece of undeveloped land in British Columbia, and set up a hippie commune. Initially, things seem to be going very well.

Fluctuations in Vonnegut's mood between utter euphoria and total despair signal the slow onset of schizophrenia. The process of descent into illness is meticulously described. The author recounts, in detail, three intense episodes, two stays in a mental hospital, and the recovery.

I am poorly qualified to have an opinion on the issue, but it seems to me that Mark Vonnegut wants to suggest the biochemical basis of his illness rather than seeing it as a social construct, as an individual's reaction to the insanity of a society at war.

While I read the book with interest, and while I very much appreciate the author's intentions of providing a first-person account of "descent into madness," I am wondering to what degree the detailed descriptions of thought processes during the episodes were altered ("edited") by his memory during the period between the actual episode and the writing of this book, which took place quite some time after the illness struck.