My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward
“Narrator Josh Bloomberg is truly perfect. He conveys every emotion that Lukach expresses—devastation at Giulia’s delusions and repeated hospitalizations, frustration with the inflexibility and inexactitude of the mental health system, sheer exhaustion and occasional resentment at being a caregiver, and joy at seeing the depression lift before his eyes in an aerobics class full of elderly Asian women. An important story and a lovely performance. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
AudioFile
An Amazon Best Book of the Month for May 2017
Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
A heart-wrenching, yet hopeful, memoir of a young marriage that is redefined by mental illness and affirms the power of love.
Mark and Giulia’s life together began as a storybook romance. They fell in love at eighteen, married at twenty-four, and were living their dream life in San Francisco. When Giulia was twenty-seven, she suffered a terrifying and unexpected psychotic break that landed her in the psych ward for nearly a month. One day she was vibrant and well-adjusted; the next she was delusional and suicidal, convinced that her loved ones were not safe.
Eventually, Giulia fully recovered, and the couple had a son. But, soon after Jonas was born, Giulia had another breakdown, and then a third a few years after that. Pushed to the edge of the abyss, everything the couple had once taken for granted was upended.
A story of the fragility of the mind, and the tenacity of the human spirit, My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward is, above all, a love story that raises profound questions: How do we care for the people we love? What and who do we live for? Breathtaking in its candor, radiant with compassion, and written with dazzling lyricism, Lukach’s is an intensely personal odyssey through the harrowing years of his wife’s mental illness, anchored by an abiding devotion to family that will affirm readers’ faith in the power of love.
Praise