Many of the earliest quilts were unpatterned and irregular, old rags piled one against the other in a confusion of colours and texture. They were called crazy quilts; there was no order to their appearance, no sense on their surface. But they kept off the cold.
This book appears at first glance to be a quilt of madness. It seems an autobiography, a life, yet nowhere could I find a mention of the author's age or exact birthplace, and except for a few flashbacks there is little about her childhood or teenage years.
It begins with an explosive description of a lineup: the perfect symbol for Canadian mental health. The lineup is for food, the kitchen door is locked; confusion, boredom, anger, the constant fear of brooding violence are squeezed into the first five pages. The rest of the book is a numbing variation on all these themes.
It straggles to a ragged end three years and 208 pages later, with a description of a Parkdale community meeting, accounts of personal goodbyes and a short epilogue about Pat's community work. Like the introduction by longtime Toronto social advocate June Callwood, the epilogue is not kept separate from the book.
Yet the pages between intro and epilogue contain more than a rambling account of three years in the boarding house life of a psychiatric survivor. It will be read as one, by people who want a tourist's snapshot of the horrors of poverty and illness and pain; it will probably become -- it should be -- required reading for Canadian university and college students who plan to have careers in what we still call mental health.
And like a tired, friendly old quilt, Upstairs in the Crazy House will offer some comfort to the thousands of ex-psych patients who still suffer through their insufferable lives. Too many PARC members know the subjects of this book by heart, and by hand, and by the cold ache of scars on their wrists and in their minds. There is some consolation in knowing these words have been written down and published, in Toronto. Perhaps now the door will be opened to other stories; perhaps there will be an audience for the pain.
But biography is also a form of art, of self-expression; and literature has a long and noble tradition of artists describing the pain of their lives and the lives of others. Jack London wrote an account of East London called People of the Abyss after living anonymously in the poorest area of that city; Charles Dickens based his descriptions of childhood workhouses on bitter experience.
It is too easy to read Upstairs in the Crazy House as just another personal account of hell; just another rant against social injustice; or just another rising star's biography, which will no doubt to aid her career within and outside the structures of power. It is far too easy, and it would cheapen both Pat's days in the boarding house and the work of art she has made of them.
The surface simplicity of her writing style and the ugly power of the horror she describes, both grip the attention and subtly work against any appreciation of this book as art. But within the seeming randomness of her structure, and in a deceptively simple style, she has brilliantly captured her life and the lives of Channon Court's other residents.
Many ex-psych patients lose the thread of their individual pasts under the battering effects of illness, pain and treatment. Fragments of memories replace a structured personal history. Time itself changes when you are medicated, and the sameness of the days makes them slip and blur one into the other, with only high or low moments to mark one year from the next in the mind. Holidays are often a cursed time spent wandering the horror-halls of memory, when you have no work, no loving family, no money to celebrate.
All these clear and present truths in the lives of ex-psych patients are evoked and displayed for the reader with clarity, simplicity and depth. In the shuffle of madness, there still remain bright threads of humour, and Pat displays an uncommon personal awareness of sanity and the necessity of human dignity.
Ms. Capponi has created a patchwork triumph from her boarding house life. Her artwork may be painfully stitched with surgical sutures, through faded cloths stained in every imaginable human fluid -- but we must not permit our aversion for her materials to allow us to miss her rare craft, her brilliant gift.
Given the politics of Canadian literature, it will not be a surprise if this book fails to make the short lists for the City of Toronto and Governor General's book awards. It will, however, be a disappointment. But this is the world of Parkdale, and of PARC, and of ex-psych patients. Disappointment, like Pat, is an old friend here. Survival is the success we struggle for every day.