I know how to create prose that people enjoy, or at least was learning to at the time. I was figuring out, how can I make this something that people will care about? Because my finding, when I was reading his story for the first time, was “Wow, my whole head had been changed.” I wanted to bring more people into that. He was living alone in the desert for a long time, so it was not necessarily something that other people who didn’t know him seemed to be willing to engage with.
My story takes this raw material that my uncle sent me - his life story that he typed in all capital letters on his typewriter. You call your book a cover version rather than a translation of your uncle’s manuscript. The challenge that Bob sent to me, in not only understanding what he wrote, but then getting his story out into the world, everything I do -still - is making good on my part of this. This whole last couple of years of the project have surprised me as much as anything else. I never thought it was possible that anyone would want this as a book. I was mostly just engaging with the manuscript that my uncle had sent me and working on turning it into something else. I didn’t know it was a book for the first five. I worked on this project for sevenish years. How did you know that your uncle’s story and your interpretation of his manuscript would be your first book? “ A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia” is both a bracing work of art and a loving tribute to a man whose voice, no matter how unpolished, deserves to be heard. Allen adds in historical, medical and family context and her own lovely prose (she received a graduate degree in creative writing while she undertook this project), but she still allows a most unreliable narrator to tell his own story (with spelling errors and all). In her compelling debut, she deconstructs Bob’s angry yet earnest telling of his life story, from his young adulthood in the Bay Area as an aspiring musician to his own recollections of repeated institutionalization and treatment. Bob had been living alone in a trailer in Northern California for years, was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and his text, suffice to say, was not an easy read.
In 2009, Sandra Allen’s uncle sent her a typewritten manuscript of his life story in ALL CAPS.