The Perfect Other: A Memoir of My Sister

It would be easy to summarize The Perfect Other as a memoir about experiencing a sister's battle with mental illness, and it would be true. But even with the author's deep clinical knowledge of schizophrenia (driven by her own research and experiences), it's really about love and how fiercely it persists.

Like Kyleigh Leddy and her sister, Kait (whom she describes as “exuberantly bright,” “confident and hilarious and at least five years ahead of every trend” - the kind of person people can't help but write books about), my sister and I are five years apart. The Perfect Other pushed me to imagine what my life would have looked like if, through some accident of biology or neurochemistry or maybe even just few bad concussions, my beloved sister changed into someone I didn't recognize, someone dizzying and unpredictable and capable of violence - but deep down, still in there, fighting with voices for space inside her own head. What we and the world would have lost if she'd ultimately felt hopeless and overpowered enough to end her life at 22.

I'm astonished that Leddy - who won the NYT's Modern Love college essay contest in 2019 - is only in her mid-twenties. Her reflections not just on her own experiences but on the human condition are beautifully written and hauntingly accurate. Consider this description of interactions with classmates and teachers after her sister has gone missing, presumed dead:
“This is an essential lesson: The indifference of the world ... People will say, ‘I can't imagine what you're going through.' What they won't say is, ‘I don't want to.' You know this is a necessary, albeit unfortunate, limitation of human empathy: If society stopped to embrace the full scope of every loss, it would cease to function - no mail, no grocery delivery, no economy. We would be in a constant state of mourning, but to be grieving and watch the world continue on is the cruelest outrage.”

Yes, this is heartbreakingly true - but by telling this story in such a raw and honest way, she makes Kait real and forces the reader beyond indifference. The care she catalyzes starts out as specific to Kait, but later expands to many others. You can't read this book and not feel grief and empathy and love.

I devoured this book in a few hours. There were a few occasions where Leddy's writing started to feel repetitive or rambling (more like a journal entry than a memoir), but this isn't surprising considering the subject matter - while we'd like to think of mental illness as tidy, as linear and predictable, it's anything but and I think this is a reflection of that. And while she does an impressive job of acknowledging Kait's and her family's relative privilege, I was struck by the use of “gypped” as a slur.

Overall, I'm glad the world has Leddy as a writer. I'll be thinking about her, her mother, and Kait for a long time.

Thanks to Mariner Books (formerly HMH Books) for my ARC.