“I was 16 when my father came home from his three-month stay in the mental hospital. I kept him company as he unpacked his suitcase and carefully, robotically, put away his neatly folded undershirts and shorts. The father who’d returned wasn’t the ranting and raving, blazing-eyed, physically wasted, delusional man who’d left, but he wasn’t my pre–nervous breakdown father either. This facsimile had a blank countenance, a prescription for the anti-psychotic Thorazine and a thoroughly electroshocked brain he referred to as ‘scrambled.’”