Glad You're Not Me

Jonathan Harnisch has proclaimed himself the King of Mental Illness. A schizophrenic with Tourette's, he often feels like a twisted character treading in an otherwise ordinary world. It comes as both a shock and a familiar feeling, then, when he discovers that a friend and fellow author has written him into her book. Seeking to displace the perhaps one-dimensional image created of him, Harnisch sets out to write his own account of the characters that have ruled his life-bare, raw, and endlessly revealing. Glad You're Not Me is a rarely seen, shocking account of living with schizophrenia. Written in chaotic vignettes that resonate to the same frequency as William Burrough's Naked Lunch, the pages leap from bitter honesty to barbed defenses to deeply disturbing pornographic fantasy. Harnisch's disturbed, arrogant, and brutally authentic voice is unapologetic in its obscenities and dangerous desires, for mental illness comes with no filter-it is dark, it is troubling, it leads its audience into confusing places. To censor the words within this book would strip it of its integrity, for the reader must see, however horrible, the truth of illnesses of the mind.