In 2014, Tim Granata killed his mother Claudia at their family home, using knives, a sledgehammer and rope. He was 22 and she was 58. He had schizophrenia, and had been off his medication for months. Once he was put on trial, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Since the killing, Tim has been locked up in a psychiatric treatment center. This memoir is by his older brother Vince, describing their lives before and after. 

We get a clear picture of family. The parents were both physicians. His father was associated with Yale. They had four children, Vince and then triplets, Tim, Chris and Lizzy. They lived in New England and they had a comfortable life. Tim started showing some symptoms of mental illness as a teenager and he became obviously psychotic when he was in college. He had also been very active as a wrestler, which led him to developing both strength and bulk. In college, he became particularly interested in philosophy, and he did well at it. There is a suggestion that he disguised some of his psychosis as philosophizing about the nature of reality. 

Granata describes how both his parents worked hard to get Tim good treatment. Tim would do much better when he was medicated. But he also would not accept that he had an illness and he was very resistant to taking medication. Granata argues that this lack of insight is part of schizophrenia — a condition known as anosognosia. He also argues that “patient rights” laws allowing mentally ill patients to refuse medication and treatment fail to recognize that the patients are not free in their refusal of medication. The refusal is part of the illness. It is not liberating for the law to allow the illness to ruin their lives. Tim’s life would likely be better now, and he would be more free, if treatment had been mandated in the months before he ended up spiraling into further psychosis and eventually killing.

Before the killing, Granata had grown rather nervous around his brother Tim, and he was not sure that his family was safe around him. Tim had been growing angrier and was saying that he had been abused as a child. But their parents wanted to do all they could to care for Tim. Granata was working 1000 miles away from home when he heard about his mother’s death.

Naturally, Granata spent a lot of time contemplating what could have been done to avoid his mother’s death. He considered his own responsibility, and he was also angry at Tim’s psychiatrists and the system of treatment for not doing more. A good deal of the memoir is describing his process of coming to understand that people did what they could within the bounds of the system. He was angry and traumatized by his experience, and he went into therapy to deal with his emotions. He also happened to come to date a woman who was a forensic psychologist and discussed his feelings about his family with her. These experiences brought him to a position of greater peace. While he had been a high school teacher, he has enrolled in a doctoral program in creative writing in Texas and he has published this memoir as well as several other pieces about his family’s trauma. Tim remains detained at the Whiting Forensic Hospital in Middletown, Connecticut. 

Everything is Fine is a powerful memoir, addressing a great many issues. Much of it is about remembering Grantata’s relationship with his mother, and expressing his love for her. He also writes a great deal about Tim and his memories of growing up. There’s less about his father and his other two siblings. In interviews he has said that Tim has read the memoir and was fine with it. I haven’t seen anything about what the other family members think.

Grantata is clear that he can’t speak for Chris and Lizzy. He says that they didn’t go to visit Tim after the murder, and they were more profoudly affected because they were in the womb with Tim as triplets. While there probably is a bond between triplets, this seems a little evasive as to what was going on. It’s a tricky matter for him to respect his family member’s privacy while still writing about the most traumatic event of their lives. 

Tim will likely spend most of the rest of his life in psychiatric detention. So he won’t be able to have much of a relationship with any of his remaining family members. Grantata did visit him regularly for some time. They retain a loving relationship as brothers. At first Tim had amnesia but he gradually was able to remember more of what he did. Grantata is clear that Tim is not only not legally responsible for what he did, and he also does not hold this brother responsible. Nevertheless, their relationship will never return to what it had been. The fact that Tim killed their mother is likely to place an additional barrier to a return to closeness, in addition to his physical location and his psychological problems. It would be informative to compare Grantata’s experience with that of Chris and Lizzy, but it is unlikely that they are willing to go public in the way he has. 

There’s a great deal of rich material in Everything is Fine for anyone interested in the families of people with mental illness and trauma. Grantata is good at providing details with surprising significance, such as a series of letters between his mother and her sister written when they were teenagers. He discusses their meaning for him, and how difficult it was for him to read them. The grief of losing his mother and, to a large extent, Tim, runs all through the memoir. Yet, while often moving, it is not a sad book. Rather, it is one that places the reader in connection and dialog with the author. It makes you wonder how you might deal with something as traumatic as what he experienced.

Christian Perring is editor of Metapsychology Online.

Categories: Memoirs

Keywords: memoir, schizophrenia, family