The Eden Express
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The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity, is a 1975 book by Mark Vonnegut, son of American writer Kurt Vonnegut, about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery. The tendency to insanity he acknowledged may be partly hereditary, influencing him to take up the study of medicine and orthomolecular psychiatry.
The foreword was written by Kurt Vonnegut.
On why this book was written, Kurt Vonnegut can be quoted saying: "His wish is to tell people who are going insane something about the shape of the roller coaster they are on."
The Eden Express is an autobiographical account of Mark’s years immediately after college, his thoughts, experiences and descent into and eventual emergence from mental illness. It starts with the words, "June 1969: Swarthmore Graduation. The night before, someone had taken white paint and painted "Commence What?" on the front of the stage." It continues with his travelogue on his journey in an expertly packed VW Bug to the wilds of British Columbia to build a commune with his girlfriend and friends. The book continues till two years later, on Valentine's Day, 1971, Vonnegut was committed to Hollywood Psychiatric Hospital in Vancouver, about 10 days after taking mescaline, which left him unable to sleep and uninterested in eating. He was diagnosed as severely schizophrenic.
Kurt Vonnegut has said the book is about "...his crackup, straitjacket and padded cell stuff, from which he recovered sufficiently to graduate from Harvard Medical School."
The New York Times describes the book as "...Mark Vonnegut’s depiction of his descent into, and eventual emergence from, mental illness. As a recent college graduate, self-avowed hippie, and son of a counterculture hero, Vonnegut begins to experience increasingly delusional thinking, suicidal thoughts, and physical incapacity. In February 1971 he is committed to a psychiatric hospital… (an) honest, thoughtful, and moving account of the illness of schizophrenia. Required reading for those who want to understand insanity from the inside."
The book was also translated into Swedish, under the name Express till paradiset.
