A Room with a Darker View

by Claire Phillips

  25 Weiner, Jocelyn. “Breakdown: California’s Mental Health System, Explained.” CalMatters, 30 Apr. 2019. Web.

  26 Bhandari, Sadgun. “Descriptive psychopathology.” Core Psychiatry (Third Edition) Eds. Padraig Wright, Julian Stern, and Michael Phelan. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 2012. 83–93.

  27 Chase. 165–166.

  28 Saks, Elyn R. The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness. New York: Hachette, 2015. 149.

  29 Ibid.

  30 Ibid. 76.

  Photo: Mara Feder

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to all those whose encouragement and support of this book sustained me over the five long years it took to complete this memoir, particularly Orli Low, Susie McDonnell, Krystina Mierins, Linda Landels, Carrie Paterson, Allen Peacock, Rachel Mirriam Rehwald, Anna Joy Springer, and Irene Tsatsos.

  I am also indebted to Black Clock magazine, helmed by acclaimed author Steve Erickson and Senior Editor Bruce Bauman, for commissioning an early work that is the basis of this book.

  Thank you also to the staff and faculty of Critical Studies at CalArts for their influence and community. The institutional support of CalArts, SCI-Arc, UC Irvine, and Glendale College, where I have served for over ten years as Director of the Los Angeles Writers Reading Series, has sustained me in profound ways.

  I am no less thankful to friends and family, many of whom are mentioned in these pages. A special thank you to my dear friend Alida Hanson for her generous and early support of this work, and much gratitude to Nike Schroeder for her keen eye and gorgeous cover design.

  So much of my thinking has emerged from conversations with my guiding light, Connie Samaras, whose support and keen insight has been an essential part of the writing process.

  Claire Phillips is the author of the novella Black Market Babies and recipient of the American Academy of Poets, First Prize. Her writing has appeared in Black Clock magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Motherboard-Vice among other places. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received notable mention in The Best American Essays 2015. She teaches writing at CalArts, the Southern California Institute for Architecture (SCI-Arc), University of California, Irvine, and is Director of the Los Angeles Writers Reading Series at Glendale College. She holds a M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University, and a B.A. in English from San Francisco State University.