Adam's New Eden
This book began as an attempt to understand my father, to trace the fault lines between the man I knew and the man illness made him. Writing it was both an act of remembrance and of survival—an effort to give shape to something that so often felt unspeakable.
Schizophrenia is a word that can eclipse the person it describes, but I wanted to write the man and our family back into view, to tell our story and the chaos that eventually consumed him. This memoir is not only about loss, but about the fierce love that endures within it—the kind that insists on seeing light even as the world fractures around it.
In telling his story, I found that memory itself is fragile, shifting, and full of ghosts. Yet within those cracks, I discovered a quiet truth: that love, however complicated, is the thread that holds us to one another, even as everything else begins to come undone. Family is everything.
Fee Sievers
Told through the haunted eyes of his daughter, Adam's New Eden is a powerful memoir that charts the unraveling of a father’s mind and the ripple effects of schizophrenia on a family struggling to hold itself together.
At first, Raymond Bear is a man of brilliance and charm - a family man and also a dreamer with wild ideas. But as his mental health begins to deteriorate, the line between reality and delusion blurs. His daughters become both witness and unwilling participant in his descent: the frantic nights, the whispered conspiracies, the sudden disappearances, and the moments of heartbreaking lucidity that make her long for the father she once knew.
The family’s world becomes a fragile ecosystem of fear, love, and denial as they navigate a system ill-equipped to help him. Each chapter captures the push and pull between compassion and exhaustion, hope and despair.
When his life ends in the most bizarre and tragic circumstances - an event that feels both surreal and inevitable - his daughter is left to piece together the fragments of his story and her own.
Adam's New Eden is a deeply human exploration of mental illness, family bonds, and the thin, unpredictable line that separates order from chaos.
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