9. The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

The Center Cannot Hold:
My Journey Through Madness
By Elyn R. Saks
Publisher: Hyperion
352 pages
$24.95

Saks was valedictorian at Vanderbilt and a Marshall scholar at Oxford before she got her law degree from Yale. She also suffers from schizophrenia that has caused her to experience wild hallucinations, debilitating paranoia and violent psychotic breaks. As a clear-eyed portrait of a brilliant mind run off the rails, Saks's memoir recalls novels like The Bell Jar and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. (Another great memoir of mental illness from 2007 that deserves a mention is Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's, by John Elder Robison, brother of the bestselling writer Augusten Burroughs.)