The Center Cannot Hold (2007)

Elyn Saks was only 8 when she first dipped into madness, albeit briefly. But while at England's Oxford University, she slipped into full-blown psychosis and landed in a mental hospital. With her schizophrenia barely controlled by medicine and talk therapy, she finished her master's and went to Yale Law School. She returned to a mental hospital — this time, slammed into painful restraints. Now a happily married law professor at USC, she's prevailed over her illness. Though Saks sidesteps her relationship with her parents, a puzzling omission from The Center Cannot Hold, her descriptions of her descents into psychosis are riveting. A-