About the Author
IN MY BROTHER’S MADNESS
Greg Bottoms, author of "God, Glass, LSD: A Memory"

"I remember the day I sat down and wrote the simple declarative: ‘My brother saw the face of God.’ This was six years after my brother had gone to prison after a genuinely bizarre, sad, violent life. That sentence had a propulsive feel, and it was the truth." Three or four hours, or one sitting later, Greg Bottoms had the first draft of "God, Glass, LSD: A Memory," and the gut hunch that this was only the beginning. "I knew I was going to write a memoir about this, that in some way I had been working up to this."

There would be more writers in the world if the great stuff always came this freely, but Bottoms also acknowledges the significant groundwork that preceded the essay leading to his memoir, "Angelhead." "I had been writing 1500 or so words a day, every day, five days a week, for about five or six years first." After receiving his MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, Bottoms worked on short stories and started novels. "I began to just be going through the motions, when there was no intensity or emotion behind the words." At some point, the fiction became more autobiographical, and Bottoms published short stories and journalistic work in magazines. And then one day the sentence—"My brother saw the face of God."

"I KNEW all of a sudden, after many years of hard, hard work that I could do it."

"God, Glass, LSD: A Memory" came from an organic blend of experience, prior reading, and obviously, memory. But when launching into the broader scope of the memoir, Bottoms conducted further research by reading several books on schizophrenia. "I wanted to know what it was like to be schizophrenic, how thoughts got jumbled—auditory and visual hallucinations, grand delusions. The best things I read were testimonials by schizophrenics. They were amazingly raw and heartbreaking." A more complete understanding of his brother’s disease added to his personal heartbreak.

"At the time, he was simply frightening, someone to avoid. However, I began to see how all the things he did—many of them criminal—made perfect sense to him. Perhaps even, in his skewed perception, [they] were ‘moral’ actions." Bottoms also read the complete New Testament several times, especially Revelation, for a better grasp of his brother’s way of thinking. "Once he was sick, all [thinking] came from his interpretation of the Bible."

Halfway into the essay, Bottoms reminds us—"But memory fades, tricks, becomes convenient, reshapes itself." Other phrases describe memory as "unmoored chunks...a series of fragments...a scratched record." Bottoms stresses deliberately the fallibility of memory.

"I emphasize it, first, to be honest. This isn’t a history or biography with footnotes. It’s a portrait of my brother in all his complex terror—memory, facts, imagination. Second, it is formally important for the book. I push the limits of memoir, and quite intentionally. I make myself creator, omniscient consciousness, of the story at hand." Bottoms read and studied many novels with the intent to "assimilate this notion of technical artifice—sort of a meta-stance within the text. In parts of the memoir, the character disappears, though of course the author is implicitly there." This technique allowed Bottoms to create whole chapters based on facts, records, and anecdotes, all held together by his imagination.

Although Bottoms distinguishes his autobiographical fiction from his creative nonfiction, he does not think it is that important for the reader to know the difference. (Many literary journals list short fiction and creative nonfiction only by title without genre identification.) "I think good writing—original, honest, precise, controlled, all done with feeling yet acknowledging the tantamount importance of aesthetic quality--is its own excuse for existing. I like to be crushed by a piece of writing; I like to be dazzled. It doesn’t happen enough, but when it happens—in a novel, a memoir, a piece of reportage, whatever, that feeling is enough make me not care otherwise. Of course, I didn’t come to this from journalism but from fiction, so that may have a lot to do with my take on things."

Greg Bottoms hopes that readers of "God, Glass, LSD: A Memory" and "Angelhead" (coming out this year by Crown) will appreciate his writing and better understand the complexities of schizophrenia. "In my brother’s madness, I saw everything—good and evil, hope and hopelessness, damnation and salvation, anger, violence, and extreme remorse. His struggle seemed almost biblical to me as a storyteller. It was much bigger than me, and him, and my family. It was sort of about God and trying to devise a world in which the individual actually matters." Bottoms reflects on his last statement, "trying to devise a world in which the individual actually matters," and points out "that could describe both art and mental illness, both myself, the writer, and my brother, the schizophrenic."

Cassi Ney