Angelhead by Greg Bottoms

The July/August Poets & Writers features a profile of Virginia author Greg Bottoms. His new project, The Colorful Apocalypse, is a book on “outsider artists.” If you’ve seen In the Realms of the Unreal or Junebug, they portray outsider artists. Or perhaps you’ve seen a famous work of outsider art, such as The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly.

In the P&W article Bottoms comes across as an outsider himself. A journalist must simultaneously reveal himself to and hide himself from his subject, which is tricky enough. When your subject is mentally ill or delusional, where do you draw your boundaries?

Bottoms struggles with the ethical implications of daring to tell someone else’s story, and nowhere is the struggle more poignant and painful than in Angelhead, his memoir of growing up with his brother, Michael, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Michael’s entire family suffered and suffered — it’s very difficult to meet this kind of emotional turmoil as a reader. As a writer, brother, and son, Bottoms must have felt harrowed to the core.

Angelhead is excellent, horrifying, hopeful. I look forward to reading The Colorful Apocalypse.