‘A book that will stay with me for a long time’. @judithbarrow77 reviews Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home by @Annecdotist

Today’s team review is from Judith. She blogs here https://judithbarrowblog.com/

Judith has been reading Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home by Anne Goodwin

The one thing that was going through my mind as I read Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home was that there is only us inside our own heads. Obvious I know, but no one has an insight into anyone else’s thoughts, whatever the state of our mental health. And, quite often, it’s a case of second guessing on anyone’s reasons for their actions.

In this powerful and moving story, Anne Goodwin has shown the frailties and strength of each of her main characters through their internal dialogue, their actions, and their reactions to what is happening to them.

 Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home is narrated by three characters: Matilda (Matty) herself; cruelly and discriminatorily incarcerated for fifty years in a psychiatric hospital, this seventy-year-old woman tells her own story in her own inimitable way – skewed as it is by increasing confusion – yet still with some individual insight that brings out wry and compassionate smiles in the reader, even as the horror of her life story unfolds. 

Janice – a young newly qualified, newly single, social worker who, unable to mend her own broken world, seeks a project within her work at the asylum; a relic of such places that existed in the early decades of the twentieth century. Misguidedly, and seemingly unable to accept that Matty is totally institutionalised, Janice takes on the task of trying to find Matty’s long-lost family and guides her towards integration into the community, a programme devised in the nineteen nineties. I don’t like to give away any spoilers to stories – so I’ll leave that there

And then there’s Henry, now almost sixty, side-lined in his job, dithering within a clandestine relationship – and waiting for the return of his sister, a girl who left home in undisclosed circumstances. The author cleverly layers this sister in enigmatic ambiguity. It’s left to the reader to unravel the mystery.

 Each of these characters are cleverly brought to life on the page, by their dialogue, by their actions. Every turn of a page is a revelation, an insight to human emotions and the lives we think we are creating, but, more often than not, are structured through fate and inadvertent choices.

 The descriptions of the settings that the characters move through are brilliantly shown, giving a great sense of place, and evocative images. They also gave me a sense of claustrophobia for each of them, the sense of each being trapped, even as they go about, or are guided through, their individual lives.

This is such a absorbing book. It’s a complex and heart-breaking family story against a background of an historical, inflexible mental care system, tumbling into, what I think, through personal experience, was a injudicious, if well-meant plan.

Though the pace of the story is sometimes frustratingly slow, it becomes obviously necessary as the plot unfolds. For me, the denouement is enough. And Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home is a book that will stay with me for a long time.

Thoroughly recommended.

In the dying days of the old asylums, three paths intersect.

Henry was only a boy when he waved goodbye to his glamorous grown-up sister; approaching sixty, his life is still on hold as he awaits her return.

As a high-society hostess renowned for her recitals, Matty’s burden weighs heavily upon her, but she bears it with fortitude and grace.

Janice, a young social worker, wants to set the world to rights, but she needs to tackle challenges closer to home.
A brother and sister separated by decades of deceit. Will truth prevail over bigotry, or will the buried secret keep family apart?

Told with compassion and humour, Anne Goodwin’s third novel is a poignant, compelling and brilliantly authentic portrayal of asylum life, with a quirky protagonist you won’t easily forget.

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‘a book that will stay with me for a long time’. @judithbarrow77 reviews a story about #mentalhealth Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home by @Annecdotist 

Today’s team review is from Judith. She blogs here https://judithbarrowblog.com/

Judith has been reading Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home by Anne Goodwin

The one thing that was going through my mind as I read Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home was that there is only us inside our own heads. Obvious I know, but no one has an insight into anyone else’s thoughts, whatever the state of our mental health. And, quite often, it’s a case of second guessing on anyone’s reasons for their actions.

In this powerful and moving story, Anne Goodwin has shown the frailties and strength of each of her main characters through their internal dialogue, their actions, and their reactions to what is happening to them.

 Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home is narrated by three characters: Matilda (Matty) herself; cruelly and discriminatorily incarcerated for fifty years in a psychiatric hospital, this seventy-year-old woman tells her own story in her own inimitable way – skewed as it is by increasing confusion – yet still with some individual insight that brings out wry and compassionate smiles in the reader, even as the horror of her life story unfolds. 

Janice – a young newly qualified, newly single, social worker who, unable to mend her own broken world, seeks a project within her work at the asylum; a relic of such places that existed in the early decades of the twentieth century. Misguidedly, and seemingly unable to accept that Matty is totally institutionalised, Janice takes on the task of trying to find Matty’s long-lost family and guides her towards integration into the community, a programme devised in the nineteen nineties. I don’t like to give away any spoilers to stories – so I’ll leave that there

And then there’s Henry, now almost sixty, side-lined in his job, dithering within a clandestine relationship – and waiting for the return of his sister, a girl who left home in undisclosed circumstances. The author cleverly layers this sister in enigmatic ambiguity. It’s left to the reader to unravel the mystery.

 Each of these characters are cleverly brought to life on the page, by their dialogue, by their actions. Every turn of a page is a revelation, an insight to human emotions and the lives we think we are creating, but, more often than not, are structured through fate and inadvertent choices.

 The descriptions of the settings that the characters move through are brilliantly shown, giving a great sense of place, and evocative images. They also gave me a sense of claustrophobia for each of them, the sense of each being trapped, even as they go about, or are guided through, their individual lives.

This is such a absorbing book. It’s a complex and heart-breaking family story against a background of an historical, inflexible mental care system, tumbling into, what I think, through personal experience, was a injudicious, if well-meant plan.

Though the pace of the story is sometimes frustratingly slow, it becomes obviously necessary as the plot unfolds. For me, the denouement is enough. And Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home is a book that will stay with me for a long time.

Thoroughly recommended.

In the dying days of the old asylums, three paths intersect.

Henry was only a boy when he waved goodbye to his glamorous grown-up sister; approaching sixty, his life is still on hold as he awaits her return.

As a high-society hostess renowned for her recitals, Matty’s burden weighs heavily upon her, but she bears it with fortitude and grace.

Janice, a young social worker, wants to set the world to rights, but she needs to tackle challenges closer to home.
A brother and sister separated by decades of deceit. Will truth prevail over bigotry, or will the buried secret keep family apart?

Told with compassion and humour, Anne Goodwin’s third novel is a poignant, compelling and brilliantly authentic portrayal of asylum life, with a quirky protagonist you won’t easily forget.

AmazonUK | AmazonUS

Teaching the importance of compassion, empathy and kindness. @fparkerswords Reviews Stephen From The Inside Out by @Sooz_Stead

Today’s team review is from Frank. He blogs here https://franklparker.com/

Frank has been reading Stephen From The Inside Out by Susie Stead

For me, reviewing this book presented a dilemma: should I judge it on its literary qualities or on the effect of the subject matter on me as a reader? In the end I chose both options.

The first is easy: Susie Stead has demonstrated, in her first published full length book, that she is a talented writer. She relates Stephen’s story in a way that cannot fail to draw the reader into his extraordinary life, at the same time, revealing a great deal about herself.

As for subject matter, I need to begin by defining genre. In the strictest sense this is a biography: Stephen is a real person and this is his life story. But the biographies that most people read, that most publishers are only interested in, are of people who have already caught the public imagination. ‘Celebrities’ of one kind or another, however well deserved their celebrity. As the author reminds us in her final paragraph, “[Stephen] said his life was a waste of time but he lived it as if every particle of it mattered.”

It is also, in part, Susie’s autobiography as she compares her own early life with Stephen’s and as her personal life changes in profound ways, independently of, but in parallel with the later years of Stephen’s.

So who, then, was Stephen? Why is his life story important – much, much more important than that of any ‘sleb’?

When the author first met him, in 2000, she was a vicar’s wife residing in the Home Counties of England. Stephen was a 45 year old inmate of a psychiatric hospital, attending a day centre which Susie and a group from her husband’s Church had decided to visit. Susie struck up a conversation with Stephen. Her friendship and advocacy for him continued until his death in 2018. In 2014 she decided to write her book about him. He agreed to allow this. The book is peppered with his responses to sections of the book she read back to him as his story progressed.

But this is not just the story of one disturbed individual’s tangles with authority, it is also the story of changing attitudes to, awareness of, and treatments for autism/Asperger’s, schizophrenia and mental illness in general. By 2000, Stephen had spent most of his adult life in institutions, 18 of them in the same psychiatric hospital. For most of that time his status was that of ‘voluntary patient’ – except that he was informed that, should he discharge himself, he would immediately be ‘sectioned’, meaning that he would still be a patient but now subject to release only when the professional staff deemed it ‘safe’ to do so.

Official policy on the treatment of mentally ill people in the UK changed significantly between 1955 and 2000, with a plan to significantly reduce the number of individuals detained in this way. Most were henceforward to be cared for in a community setting. Stephen’s story tells us a great deal about the practical implications of such a policy when pursued without adequate resources.

The book raises many questions about personal autonomy and the freedom to choose how one lives one’s life. Under the most recent legislation in the UK, every patient/client of a care organisation has to have his/her views, and those of family and informal carers, taken into consideration when decisions are made about when/where/if they should be admitted to a care home. What if such views are unrealistic in regards to the safety of the patient/client in their own home? Where do you draw the line between a desire to achieve the best outcome for someone, based on compassion, and unwarranted interference in that person’s chosen way of life?

Whilst considering these questions I was struck by something else. In addition to Susie, Stephen had a number of individuals who not only cared about his welfare but were able to articulate their concerns to the professionals and to assist him as he negotiated the labyrinthine bureaucracy they tend to hide behind. There are many who are not so fortunate, who either do not have anyone to speak up on their behalf, or whose close relative(s) that may wish to do so lack the confidence and determination such advocacy requires.

Stephen’s story, as told by Susie, is full of highs and lows. There are many farcical episodes that brought a smile to my face. Other incidents that made me sad or angry by turns.

It is said that autistic people experience the world differently from most of us. That is a statement with which I have some difficulty. I have similar reservations about a term I have recently seen used in articles by and about people diagnosed with Asperger’s: ‘Neuro-typical’. The implication of both is that the majority of people, those without such a diagnosis, all perceive the world in exactly the same way. My own opinion is that we all exist on a spectrum somewhere between ‘sanity’ and extreme mental illness, between ‘normal’ and ‘batty’ in our habits and foibles.

Stephen’s view of the world is certainly unique. He has an understandable fear of hospitalisation. He believes that various individuals and organisations are out to get him. And yet he is capable of holding perfectly rational conversations about politics and religion. He writes poetry. By the end it is his physical disabilities, rather than his mental illness, that proves to be his downfall.

Long before the end I came to regard Susie, and the other men and women who care about Stephen’s welfare, as something of a saint for the way she and they put up with Stephen’s constant demands, expressed in phone calls the frequency of which would have driven me to distraction.

The same goes for the professionals who are legally responsible for his care and treatment. At least most of them are able to move on as their careers progress or the care contract expires. Not that Susie sees herself in that light. On the contrary, she clearly wishes there was more she could have done for him.

I could  not help feeling guilty at my own inadequacies as a son and brother. What might my own response be should any of my siblings, my wife or son find themselves in Stephen’s predicament?

Why is the book important? Because it demonstrates how knowing someone like Stephen teaches the importance of compassion, empathy, or just plain kindness. Perhaps we all need a Stephen in our lives. As Nick Knowles says at the end of every episode of “DIY SOS: the big build”, ‘perhaps you know someone who needs your help.’ Read this book and be inspired.

‘In our love, however little, we create a web that breaks a person’s fall.’

“Susie, my life has been a complete and total waste of time”.

In 2012 when Stephen said this, he believed it to be true. But was it? And how do we decide?

From the outside, it may have looked like this. Stephen spent 25 years inside British psychiatric wards, was finally diagnosed with autism in his late forties and never felt acceptable in the ‘normal’ world.

From the inside, though, here was a man with powerful convictions, deep longings, wide interests and an incapacity to be anything other than himself, whatever the cost.

This is his story, inside and out; a story of grave injustices, saints and bigots, a faithful dog, a wild woman, a fairy godmother and angels hidden in plain sight.

It is also the story of the author, Susie, who started off by wanting to ‘help’ Stephen ‘get better’, and instead found herself profoundly challenged by a friendship she did not expect.

Idiosyncratic, unorthodox, tragic, yet at times hilarious – this book not only tells a compelling and important story but will be vital reading for anyone who cares about mental health in our contemporary world or who might just be open to a different way of seeing: from the inside out.

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Rosie’s #Bookreview Team #RBRT #LiteraryFiction Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home by @Annecdotist

Today’s team review is from Olga. She blogs here https://www.authortranslatorolga.com

Olga has been reading Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home by Anne Goodwin

I arrived in the UK in September 1992. My goal was to qualify as a psychiatrist (I had studied Medicine back home in Barcelona, Spain) and, also, to improve my English. I started working as a junior doctor in psychiatry in February 1993, and Anne Goodwin’s new novel is set (mostly) just a couple of years earlier, at a moment when mental health services in the UK were undergoing a major change. The move from the big old-style asylums —where people who suffered from chronic mental health conditions, sometimes poorly defined, were “warehoused”—to “care in the community”, with its resulting emphasis on normalisation, on reintegration, and on support within the family, and/or the community, rocked the foundations of the system, and resulted on new practices, roles, and also in bringing to the fore a number of patients who had spent most of their lives in institutions and had real difficulties finding a place in an outside world they no longer recognised.

Even though this is a work of fiction, it is evident that the author is writing from personal experience, and that lends immediacy and depth to the story. Goodwin captures perfectly the atmosphere of the mental health asylums, where routine was sacred, and everybody had a part to play they were not allowed to deviate from. She offers readers several points of view: that of a newly-qualified social worker (Janice), who is going through an unsettling time in her personal life, and whose values and certainties will be put to the test by this job, especially by Matty’s case; Matty’s, one of the long-stay patients, whose story is less-than-certain after having been institutionalised for over 50 years, who allows us a peek into her unique world (stuck as she is in the past, an imaginary refuge from her less than glamorous reality); Henry’s, a man who also lives stuck in the past, waiting for a sister/mother whom he is no longer sure ever existed; and Matilda’s, who takes us back to the 1930s and tells us a story full of everyday tragedy, loss and despair.

Although I only experienced the aftermath of the closing of the big asylums, I got to talk to many nurses and doctors who had spent most of their working lives there, and had been involved in the changes as well. I also met many of the patients who hadn’t been lucky enough to move back into the community and ended up in newer long-term units, and also some of those who managed to create new lives for themselves, with the dedicated support of members of staff who were usually stretched to their limits. I worked in a newly-built unit in the grounds of one of the big asylums in the South of England, and walked the beautiful gardens, saw the impressive buildings (it had even had a railway station in its heyday), and it was easy to imagine how things must have been. Hardly any of the patients who’d spent years there had any contact with their families any longer, and their worlds had become reduced to their everyday routine, the tea with the sugar and milk already in, and the daily trip to the shop that the novel so realistically portrays. The way the author contrasts the experiences from the characters who live “normal” lives in the community (Henry’s life is “peculiar” to say the least, and Janice is in a sort of limbo, an impasse in her life) with Matty’s life in hospital emphasises the importance of the stories we tell ourselves, and also reminds us of the need to take control and to impose our own meaning in our lives. If we don’t, we are at risk of becoming the person or the version of ourselves that other people decide. And that is the worst of tragedies.

This is not an easy story to contemplate, and most readers will soon imagine that the truth about Matilda’s past, once revealed, will be shocking and tragic. Worse still, we know that it is all a too-familiar story, and not a flight of fancy on the part of the author. But she manages to make it deeply personal, and I challenge any casual readers not to feel both, horrified and moved, by the story.

As a mental health professional, this novel brought goosebumps to my skin and a lot of memories. As a reader, it gave me pause, and made me care for a group of characters whom I share little with (other than my professional experience). As a human being, I can only hope no girls find themselves in the position of Matilda ever again, and also that, as a society, we always remember that there is no health without mental health. Thankfully, many people have come forward in recent years and shared their mental health difficulties and their experiences trying to find help. It was about time, because those patients not at liberty to leave the hospital always reminded us that we would go home at the end of the day, but they had no home to go to, or, worse even, the hospital was their only home. Out of sight, out of mind is a terrible attitude when it comes to people’s suffering. Hiding away mental health problems does nothing to help those suffering them or the society they should be fully participating in, and Goodwin’s novel reminds us that we have come a long way, but there’s still a long way ahead.

A fantastic novel, about a tough topic, which highlights the changes in mental health policy and forces us to remember we are all vulnerable, and we should fight to ensure that nobody is ever left behind.
Thanks to the author for offering me the opportunity to read her novel ahead of publication. It will stay with me for a long time, and I’m delighted to hear that she’s already working on its second part.

In the dying days of the old asylums, three paths intersect.

Henry was only a boy when he waved goodbye to his glamorous grown-up sister; approaching sixty, his life is still on hold as he awaits her return.

As a high-society hostess renowned for her recitals, Matty’s burden weighs heavily upon her, but she bears it with fortitude and grace.

Janice, a young social worker, wants to set the world to rights, but she needs to tackle challenges closer to home.

A brother and sister separated by decades of deceit. Will truth prevail over bigotry, or will the buried secret keep family apart?

In this, her third novel, Anne Goodwin has drawn on the language and landscapes of her native Cumbria and on the culture of long-stay psychiatric hospitals where she began her clinical psychology career. 

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