
Is There No Place on Earth for Me?
Is There No Place on Earth for Me? won the Pulitzer Prize. "Sylvia Frumkin" was born in 1948 and began showing signs of schizophrenia in her teens. She spent the next seventeen years in and out of mental institutions. In 1978, reporter Susan Sheehan took an interest in her and, for more than two years, became immersed in her life: talking with her, listening to her monologues, sitting in on consultations with doctors—even, for a period, sleeping in the bed next to her in a psychiatric center. With Sheehan, we become witness to Sylvia's plight: her psychotic episodes, the medical struggle to control her symptoms, and the overburdened hospitals that, more often than not, she was obliged to call home. The resulting book, first published in 1982, was hailed as an extraordinary achievement: harrowing, humanizing, moving, and bitingly funny. Now, some two decades later, Is There No Place on Earth for Me? continues to set the standard for accounts of mental illness.
Buy this book at Amazon- Publisher
- Vintage
- Year
- 2014
- ISBN-13
- 9780804169196
- Genre
- Biography & Memoir
- Topics
- SchizophreniaMental illness treatmentPsychiatric institutions
Awards
- Pulitzer Prize for General NonfictionWonMajor(1983)
- National Book Award for NonfictionShortlistedMajor(1983)
If you liked Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, you could also like these

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Andrew Solomon
1 win · 16 score

Sontag: Her Life and Work
Benjamin Moser
1 win · 12 score

A Beautiful Mind
Sylvia Nasar
0 wins · 4 score

Anne Sexton: A Biography
Diane Wood Middlebrook
0 wins · 4 score

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
Heather Clark
0 wins · 7 score

An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales
Oliver Sacks
0 wins · 3 score

Crazy: A Father's Search through America's Mental Health Madness
Pete Earley
0 wins · 4 score

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
Anne Boyer
1 win · 12 score

A Slant of Sun: One Child's Courage
Beth Kephart
0 wins · 4 score

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
Anne Fadiman
2 wins · 20 score

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America
Brian Goldstone
1 win · 16 score

Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness
Kristen Radtke
0 wins · 7 score

How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures
Sabrina Imbler
1 win · 8 score

Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
Nancy Scheper-Hughes
0 wins · 4 score

Anatomy of an Illness As Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing
Norman Cousins
0 wins · 4 score

