To read or not to read...
Read the opening paragraphs then decide whether to read or not to read the rest of this book...
"I'm going to write a ghost story now," she typed.
"A ghost story with a mermaid and a wolf," she also typed.
I also typed.
My name is India Morgan Phelps, though almost everyone I know calls me Imp. I live in Providence, Rhode Island, and when I was seventeen, my mother died in Butler Hospital. which is located at 345 Blackstone Boulevard, right next to Swan Point Cemetery, where many notable people are buried. The hospital used to be called the Butler Hospital for the Insane, but somewhere along the way "for the Insane" was dropped. Maybe it was bad for business. Maybe the doctors or trustees or board of directors or whoever makes the decisions about such things felt crazy people would rather not be put away in a n insane asylum, that truth in advertising is a detriment. I don't know, but my mother, Rosemary Anne, was committed to Butler Hospital because she was insane. She died there, at the age of fifty-six instead of dying somewhere else, because she was insane, and it's not like I didn't know it too, and if anyone were to ask me, dropping "for the Insane" is like dropping "burger" from Burger King because hamburgers aren't as healthy as salads. Or dropping "donuts" from Dunkin' Donuts because doughnuts cause cavities and make you fat.
My grandmother Caroline-my mother's mother, who was born in 1914, and lost her husband in World War II- she was also a crazy woman, but she died in her own bed in her own house down in Wakefield. No-one put her away in a hospital, or tried to pretend she wasn't crazy. Maybe people don't notice it as much, once you get old or only older. Caroline turned on the gas and shut all the windows and doors and went to sleep, and in her suicide note she thanked my motherand my aunts for not sending her away to a hospital for the mentally insane, where she might have been forced to live even after she couldn't stand it any more. Being alive I mean. Or being crazy. Whichever or both.
It's sort of ironic that my aunts are the ones who had my mother committed.
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