Writer hopes her work sparks conversation about mental illness

Prize-winning author Virginia Holman (B.A.'88/H&S) now teaches at the college level in North Carolina.

Author Virginia Holman (B.A. ’88/H&S) says she fell into a writing career. She initially intended to study visual arts at Virginia Commonwealth University “but writing sidetracked me, and I never even took an art course at VCU,” Holman says.

Holman credits David Latané, Charlotte Morse, Paule Marshall and Sally Doud, her English professors and instructor, respectively, as well as Mary Flinn, an editor at the New Virginia Review (now Blackbird) where Holman worked as an intern, for encouraging her interest in putting pen to paper.

“I was always writing,” Holman says. “It was a habit that, with my education in writing and literature at VCU, became a passion.”

Holman returned to one subject again and again — her mother’s struggle with schizophrenia. 

“In nearly everything I wrote, I was very much trying to understand my experiences with my mother and her disease,” she says.

After graduating from VCU, Holman worked as an editor for Algonquin Books in North Carolina and continued to craft her own prose, again, much of it related to her mother’s illness and its effect on Holman. In 2003, Simon and Schuster published her memoir,“Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad.” (Patty Hearst is a metaphor here, not a character.)

At VCU, Holman always cloaked her family’s story as fiction.

“It wasn’t until many years later, after my mother was institutionalized and treated, that I could write about our family’s experience and own it,” Holman says.

Doud and Flinn were aware, however, of Holman’s real-life situation and encouraged her to write about it.

“Both, in their own way, were mother figures and role models to me,” she says.

The book recounts how Holman’s mother, in the midst of her first psychotic episode, was so delusional that she believed she’d been inducted into a secret army. On command of the voices in her head, she took her two daughters (8-year-old Holman and her 1-year-old sister, Emma) to the family cottage in Virginia to prepare for a secret war she thought was going to occur. The book also relates how antiquated mental health laws prevented Holman’s mother from receiving any treatment despite numerous efforts on her behalf.

The book won the 2003 Outstanding Literature Award from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Holman is grateful for the attention the book brought to the subject of severe mental illness and its stigma.

“As hard as it was to write and publish the book, it has led to many useful conversations about what mental illness is — a brain disease — and about the shame and fear that so many sufferers and their families experience due to the ongoing stigma associated with diseases like schizophrenia,” Holman says.  

Other awards Holman received include the Pushcart Prize for the essay, a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship for the book and other writing on mental illness and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship.

Today, Holman lives on the coast of North Carolina with her husband and son. She teaches at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and at Cape Fear Community College. Holman also writes for national magazines and is currently at work on a novel and collection of essays. Her passion for her craft remains and provides her with a platform to discuss issues close to her heart.

 “Writing allows me a place to collect my thoughts and share them with others and, I hope, begin a conversation about important matters like mental illness,” Holman says.

Editor’s note: The paperback edition of Holman’s book was released in 2004 as “Rescuing Patty Hearst: Growing Up Sane in a Decade Gone Mad.”