Angelhead: A Memoir

By Greg Bottoms

Three Rivers Press 2000

Angelhead was published almost three years ago, one of the best books of that or any other year, full of stark and beautiful gut-tearing prose, blasting apart the conventions of non-fiction, and was read by exactly nobody. Somehow, despite packing a punch even harder than the better known A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and with poetic writing that rivals the sliver-thin Jesus’ Son, and despite several scream-it-from-the-mountaintops reviews, this book slipped unnoticed and undeservingly into oblivion.

Angelhead is the true story of author Greg Bottoms’ childhood, watching his older brother Michael slip chaotically and increasingly destructively into chronic schizophrenia. Michael’s psychotic break comes one night after an Ozzy Ozbourne show, frying on LSD, fourteen and wired and writhing on his bed, seeing God in the window as Greg, ten, stands in the doorway watching, feeling this experience permeate the rest of his life from that point forward. What follows is a history, extracted from family, friend, and law enforcement interviews by Bottoms, and congealed into a narrative of bible-margin scribbling, physical attacks, sexual abuse, and erratic behavior that only gets worse with time. The story is split between two perspectives: one is Greg’s own perspective, morphing from an innocent and unprepared child, to an angry, self-destructive punk, to a college drop-out, his life terrorized by Michael and softened by drugs. It is also told from Michael’s perspective—what he must have been thinking at those watershed moments of incoherence and rage—gathered from what Michael later told parents, siblings, and friends in his moments of medicated or otherwise sane thought. And all of it is written in such cranium-blasting prose that it made me stop dead to admire many a sentence two or three times, knocked my breath out, shoved tears from the back of my eyes, made me feel—not just read, but feel—everything that happens, left at the end destroyed, but hopeful.

This book, everyone should read.

- Michael Houghton