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December 11 – December 18, 2008 Edition

Spiegel & Grau
Buy Robison Memoir
Of Mental Illness

New York, NY (Authorlink News, December 11, 2008)–Spiegel & Grau celebrated its first day as part of the Random House Publishing Group on December 4 by pre-empting the memoir of Margaret Robison, mother of writers Augusten Burroughs and John Elder Robison.  Cindy Spiegel acquired North American rights from David Kuhn at Kuhn Projects.

Robison, a teacher of writing and a published poet, tells her own story for the first time: an early life in southern Georgia with social convention masking all manner of troubles; an abusive marriage; raising two boys whose own memoirs would become publishing phenomena (Burroughs’s Running with Scissors, Dry, Magical Thinking, and A Wolf at the Door and John Elder Robison’s look me in the eye); and her ultimate descent into psychosis, followed by a massive stroke. 

Tentatively titled A PLACE TO COME HOME TO, her memoir draws on years of journals and diaries that Robison, now 73, has kept.  She describes, in spare and moving words, the way she fought her way back from mental illness, near total paralysis and loss of speech to her present life in which she enjoys a hard-won ability to speak, write, and reflect on her journey.  Her book adds a new dimension to the family portrait previously painted from the perspective of her two sons.  Comments Spiegel, “It is above all a deeply empathetic account of an illness few have come close to depicting with such candor and poignancy.”