Learning to Love: A Conversation with Natasha Williams

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

by Natasha Williams

Apprentice House, 2025; 310 pp; $22.36

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Natasha Williams was 21 when her father drove the family car off a demolished pier into the frigid New York Harbor with her baby sister in the back seat. 39 years later, Williams probes this harrowing event in the opening pages of her new memoir, as an entry point for exploring her coming of age amid her father’s schizophrenic unraveling. The Parts of Him I Kept: The Gifts of My Father’s Madness explores the power of his love and the burden and privilege of caring for a loved one who lives with mental illness.

This is Williams’s debut. She has an MA from the University of Pennsylvania and attended the Bread Loaf School of English and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Excerpts and essays have been published in the Bread Loaf Journal, Memoir Magazine, South Dakota Review, and more. I met Williams in a virtual memoir course, and we spoke via video-chat and e-mail to discuss how her most foundational relationships shaped her own mothering. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jodie Sadowsky: What motivated you to write a memoir while mothering two small children and managing your father’s eldercare? 

Natasha Williams: This project started as a long-form missive I wrote to family and friends about the challenges of finding assisted living for my schizophrenic dad. I ended up sharing it with the writer James Lasdun, who encouraged me to write the whole story. I spent the next summer getting it on the page, but it took ten years to shape. For example, I remembered being alone at an empty church with my father when I was young, but it wasn’t until I read a draft aloud to my father in his nursing home that I learned why we were there. That scene showed the ways my father’s love was profoundly touched by his delusions, but it took years to fill in the gaps in my memory and understanding I needed to make my father a whole person. One reviewer describes him as “deeply complicated, worthy of love, disturbing, and charming.” That was the story I wanted to tell.

JS: Were you part of a formal writing program or workshop? 

NW: It does take a village. It took the support of other writers and trusted readers to finish and launch this book. I took workshops with A Public Space, Sackett Street Writers, Grub Street, Dinty Moore, and Allison Williams, to name just a few. I considered an MFA and, during COVID, even unwittingly applied to Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English, thinking I was applying to a workshop—halfway through, I realized I was applying to graduate school. My own college times were tumultuous and painful, so I loved being on campus as a somewhat well-adjusted adult. I have ten years to complete that degree; maybe the next book? 

JS: This book is very much about your father’s illness, but also about your journey from a difficult childhood to becoming a strong, capable mother. Your dad’s mom was a tireless caretaker, and you grew to depend on the constancy of your summers spent with your mother’s parents where you noted that you didn’t miss your mother, but you felt her absence as if your grandparents’ love reminded you of what you weren’t getting. How do you sum up the mothering you received and observed in your life?

NW: Without my grandmother, my father would’ve been on the streets. She kept him housed, and she schooled me in his care. In turn, I made sure my daughters knew their grandfather as a loving, weirdly charismatic figure: careful not to burden them with his care, but wanting them to know him and his vulnerability, and to understand that caring for each other is what families do. 

But my mother was not close to her family. By proxy, her grandparents lavished on me all the love my mother rejected, which worked out very well for me. It was hard for me to understand my mother’s alienation from her parents because they were such a refuge for me. Grandma had a lot of love to give. We cooked and read together and listened to plays on the old record player. We both felt like we lost my mother somewhere along the way. I understood my grandmother’s heartbreak, and our closeness was a gift to both of us. More than my father’s schizophrenia, I worried about carrying forward the legacy of estrangement my mother had with her mother.

Working on this book helped me recognize how much disapproval my mother felt from her parents. As I share in the book, my mother once confessed that she thought her parents were trying to poison her. I’ve come to understand my mother was contending with her own personality disorder. But still, she held many principles about parenting. She sent me to schools to further my independence, and in the end, I think she thought I was better equipped to advocate for myself than she was. 

JS: Your need to be parented shows up frequently in your book. Sometimes you soldier on, quietly enduring the pain of your childhood; other times you assert yourself boldly.

NW: I was a kid who came into the world telling people what to do. Plus, it was the 1960s and 70s in New York City—the counterculture—and my mother’s hands-off parenting fostered in me a tendency to speak my mind and challenge authority. I think they call it parentification—when kids end up telling the adults how to behave.

I was really good at sussing out maternal figures. Luckily, I had a host of mentors and caregivers as a child and young adult, including my grandparents, our neighbor Ophelia, teachers, and eventually a therapist who helped me through complicated family situations.

JS: You write, “I had to get away from this undertow of his life, away from this father who couldn’t safeguard us, away from this feeling like he was an anchor pulling me down.” Did figuring out how to put on your oxygen mask first help you better balance motherhood?

NW: I did what many young people do as teenagers; I separated from my family. That became volumes harder with a mentally ill father who needed care, especially after my grandmother died. With the help of therapy and the Twelve Steps of Adult Children of Alcoholics (just replace alcohol with psychosis as the thing you can’t control), I learned how to care for myself. I set healthy boundaries in order to stay in my father’s life.

In the end, it was my father’s love and dedication, despite or maybe because of his illness, that was my model for being a loving parent. I knew I wanted to have children of my own. With a father who had very little but love to give, I understood love was the essential ingredient. He helped me understand what was important. Our grown daughters are writers, artists, and athletes too. As I write at the end of the book, our children have taken the music and art that have sustained my family and made them their own, rising from the ashes of my chain-smoking ancestors, phoenix-like.

JS: Do you think it sometimes goes the other way, that women who become caretakers so young decide against becoming parents?

NW: I think it depends on who you are. As my friend, the writer Elizabeth Kleinfeld, shares in her work, Here For All of It, it’s a privilege to take care of a loved one. When you’re made for that (and not everybody is), it’s empowering and rewarding to be there for another person.

In mentoring me in my father’s care, my grandmother normalized and taught me to be a caregiver to my mentally ill father. We were united in his care. Having children wasn’t ever a question for me, though it became even clearer when I married a man I knew would be a wonderful dad. 

JS: Despite their involvement in your father’s care, your family of origin did not openly discuss mental health. You wrote, “It was as if part of our dignity came from not trying to understand what we had no explanation for.” How did this change for you to write this book, in part to understand and explain your father?

NW: My kids’ generation is more open about mental health. In fact, it was my kids’ curiosity about their grandfather that propelled me into this project. I needed to make sense of my family so that my children wouldn’t have to figure out the answers to questions I hadn’t yet answered.

JS: The chapter where you and your father discuss your youngest daughter is devastating. What were your considerations in including this scene in the book?

NW: The scene you’re talking about was the afternoon he asked to take my youngest daughter, who was then a dancer, to see the movie Black Swan, a movie about a dancer who loses her mind. In his delusions, he became convinced my daughter was schizophrenic, like him, and thought it would be instructive for her. There was no way I would let him do that, but it was a reckoning moment for me. I am embarrassed to say that was the first time I consciously thought about the inheritability of schizophrenia. I stopped speaking to him for many months. I needed time to research the legacy of mental illness in our family and figure out how to set boundaries. 

I had removed this scene from an early draft my daughter read, but when I got a publishing deal, I had to decide whether to keep it. When I told her what her grandfather had said and asked her to read the scene, my daughter was in therapy herself and told me she felt emotionally solid. If she had been uncomfortable with it, I would have cut it. I shared the more difficult sections of the book with all the main characters and was gratified when each said they felt seen. As a mother and a writer, the balance between wanting to craft a story that humanizes living with mental illness, while also protecting my family members, was essential. My family could disagree with my version, but I didn’t want them to feel exposed or betrayed. 

My mother wasn’t able to read the book herself because of her cognitive decline with dementia. I’d read a couple of draft chapters to her early on, to make sure I had her experience right, so she had an opportunity to weigh in. Recently, we took turns reading the entire book to her, finishing it on her 85th birthday. Even with her impaired memory and mind, she took in the story with remarkable courage. 

JS: What do you want women and mothers reading your book to know about caring for themselves while caring for others?

NW: When I was pitching the book, agents and publishers told me that a memoir focused on mental illness would be a hard story to sell. I got some beautiful rejection letters. I’m grateful to Apprentice House for believing in this book. The role of caregivers is essential, especially in these polarized times when empathy and compassion are being devalued. We need to tell the stories of how we care for each other, how we manage to stay when leaving isn’t an option, because those are at the core of who we are. What more important story is there to tell than how we learn to love?