Best Minds

When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle, New York, in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor quickly became inseparable. Both were children of professors, and they were best friends and fierce rivals who later followed each other to Yale University.

Michael raced through Yale in three years, graduated summa cum laude and landed a top consulting job. Then Jonathan got devastating news: Michael had suffered a psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia. While still in hospital he learned he had been accepted to Yale Law School, and he was living in a halfway house when he decided, against the odds, to enroll. Still fighting delusions, he managed to graduate. After his story was featured in The New York Times, he sold a memoir for a large sum. Ron Howard bought the film rights, and Brad Pitt was set to star. It seemed to complete the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend, Carrie. Then Michael, in the grip of psychosis, committed a horrific act that made him a front-page story of a very different kind.

In this book, novelist Jonathan Rosen investigates the forces that led his childhood best friend from academic stardom to the psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. Rosen presents it as an American tragedy set in the last decades of the American century, when state mental hospitals were being emptied out.

The Best Minds explores the bonds of friendship, the price of delusion and the mystery of identity. It moves between tender, funny and harrowing, and it works both as a coming-of-age story and as an indictment of how society has neglected mental illness.