Laura M. Flynn

Reviews

Booklist (starred review), January 1, 2008

What is a child to do when the parent who’s the center of her universe becomes desperately ill? That’s the wrenching reality Flynn faces when she learns that her mother is a paranoid schizophrenic. The words were “long and strange and frankly, ugly,” writes Flynn, who was 10 at the time her father gave her mother’s frazzled frame of mind a name. “Even so, I had a feeling it was something I could hang onto, something I could rebuild my world around.” For years, Flynn and her two sisters, one older, one younger, played along as characters in their mother’s fantasy world. But when her seemingly innocuous antics (forbidding certain foods and making lists of good and evil things) turned violent, the girls father filed for divorce, then custody. Flynn’s haunting memoir vividly recaptures the San Francisco of the 1970s, an emotionally fraught era in which quirky behaviors were more likely to be sanctioned than scorned. Flynn’s ability to render the perspective of a child elevates this memoir from ordinary to extraordinary. From the start, readers see inside her impressionable young mind as she lives from one breathless moment to the next, grappling with scenarios that would level most well-adjusted adults.

City Pages, February 27, 2008

My father had vastly underestimated how predisposed the courts were to keeping children with their mothers in 1977,” Laura Flynn states in her richly detailed memoir, Swallow the Ocean, a true tale of three daughters growing up with a mentally ill single mother in San Francisco. Though the neglect suffered at the hands of a once kind and intellectually adventurous mother, and the drawn-out custody battle that ensued is unsettling, Flynn, who recounts events through the perspective of her young self, fleshes out a more complex story. For every volatile outburst and paranoid delusion, there is a memory of sisters giggling over chewing contests at the dinner table, of playing board games or drinking 7-Up at a pool party with their father, and of walks in the park with their mother. School fire drills, water balloon fights, and family vacations are as important as broken glass, deteriorating households, and temper tantrums. These details complete the dynamics of the family, as does the guilt the daughters feel, wanting help but not wanting to abandon their mother, and the realization that their mother isn’t simply mentally ill (the term “paranoid schizophrenic” isn’t even used until about three-fourths of the way through). Though eventually knowing the medical terminology is a release for the daughters, their mother and their family are more than a clinical diagnosis. — Jessica Armbruster