The Parts of Him I Kept: The Gifts of My Father's Madness

"The work offers a welcome wealth of insights into the challenges of living with mental illness. An engrossing debut memoir." - Kirkus Editors Pick

Best Books of 2025 of the Hudson Valley by Chronogram Magazine

Winner of 2026 PenCraft Book Award for Nonfiction Memoir.

"Natasha Williams has written an extraordinary memoir of growing up with a schizophrenic father ... as emotionally wrenching (and occasionally terrifying) as you would expect, but it is also funny, wise, beautifully observed and astonishingly tender." -James Lasdun, Author of Victory

"Read the first thirty pages of The Parts of Him I Kept, and I bet you would cancel your own wedding to read the rest of it. Natasha Williams has a hell of a story to tell, and she writes like an angel." -Abigail Thomas, Author of Still Life at Eighty

One cold night in April, Natasha William's father drove his car into the frigid water of New York Bay with her two-year-old half-sister in the backseat. Natasha was twenty-one. She was the one to walk him past the column of hungry reporters demanding an explanation.

The headline in The New York Post read: Back from a Watery Grave.

But Natasha's experiences growing up with her schizophrenic father in the gritty New York City of the 1970s are not so easily captured in a single headline. How could she possibly convey the power of her father's love in the face of this tragedy?

William's memoir is an intimate account of a daughter's coming of age in the face of her father's schizophrenic unraveling. Williams investigates the limits of our medical and cultural understanding of schizophrenia while chronicling the shared burden and benefits of caring for a mentally ill family member. In the tradition of Ocean Vuong's On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous and Robert Kolker's Hidden Valley Road, this is one family's story that asks us to consider the ways mental illness is as much a social issue as a biological condition and illuminates ways we find hope, and even thrive in the face of the extraordinary challenge of mental illness.