The Edge of Every Day: Sketches of Schizophrenia

Sardy's memoir doesn’t simply describe what it’s like to grow up in the orbit of schizophrenia, it draws you into its gravity, tracing the slow, spiralling pull as one veers ever closer with each cycle, bound by a force stronger than one’s own. Marin Sardy achieves this without detachment, without pathologising, and without softening the narrative for an outsider’s gaze. The Edge of Every Day reflects a lived experience that is deeply familiar to many, yet so often remains hidden, tucked away alongside feelings of helplessness, futility, and shame. While reading, it felt as though Sardy had written her memoir from within the same emotional coordinates I’ve carried for decades.

"I rarely found words for what I saw my mother do, what I heard her say... her illness seemed to always live in the shadows.”

This is not a story of a singular breakdown or a clinical account of disease. It is about the slow, creeping dissolution of reality, both for those who live through mental illness and for those who love them. Sardy writes of her mother’s schizophrenia not as a fixed event, but as a shapeless, pervasive force. A shift. A long erosion that alters the rules of a family, the terms of love, and the texture of memory. She speaks not only to madness, but to the confusing, messy entanglement of love and domination, the way boundaries collapse under the weight of someone else’s fragmented reality:

“I do love her. But... her will is so powerful and inflexible. I start feeling like I’ve been run over, and I don’t have any voice, and I have no opinions that count. It’s the boundary thing. We try to get them into our world and they try to get us into theirs.”

Sardy gives voice to a reality where illness is not solely located in the 'mentally ill' person, but instead haunts every interaction. It infects memory, language, and identity. She captures the profound difficulty of articulating these dynamics, especially as a child, when there are no available scripts, no explanations for why love is so fused to fear.

"How does a child articulate the absence of what is necessary? The absence of sanity. The absence of the mother I had known. To my eye it appeared, more than anything, that she had been stolen.”

Sardy introduces the concept of a 'Second Stream', a realm of spirit, imagination, and internal logic that slowly overtakes her mother’s grasp on shared reality. This is more than a metaphor; it articulates the porous boundaries between inner and outer worlds, a phenomenon that many neurodivergent individuals may also recognise, though not always with the same destabilising consequences. Her framing invites us to see schizophrenia not as aberrant or alien, but as situated within a broader (dare I say neurodiverse) spectrum of processing. One connected to traits such as sensitivity, creativity, and intelligence.

“Our family is what is called a multiplex family... Among my cousins, IQs are high and currents of creativity run thick, as do depression and anxiety... autism and ADHD. We are never boring.”

Sardy names the uncomfortable dualities so often overlooked: brilliance and chaos, insight and disintegration, connection and unreachability. She neither romanticises schizophrenia nor reduces it to clinical pathology. Instead, she locates it within a spectrum of neurodiverse expression, shaped as much by trauma and environment as by biology.

"It is a blend of nature and nurture that leads to the development of schizophrenia, a genetic susceptibility combined with environmental influences that begin shaping the brain just as it forms, in the womb... The potential causes are numerous and difficult to pin down.”

This reframing is crucial. It challenges dominant biomedical models by positioning schizophrenia as a complex interplay of inheritance, sensitivity, trauma, and context, making room for nuance, rather than stigma. The “new normal,” as she calls it, is the life that continues even when someone you love has departed from reality, but not from the world. The grief it brings is not of death, but of disconnection.

"Her fascinations are confounding, her behavior nonsensical. Her body has fallen into neglect and her life tilts sideways, ever in response to misapprehended cues. She still manages her house, but she inhabits another realm, one I can neither visit nor envision. From that distant place she encounters the rest of us, poorly translated. She is abstractly loving and brutally blind.”

The Edge of Every Day is about presence and absence—bearing witness to the spaces where coherence collapses, but humanity remains. Reading this memoir feels like looking into a mirror held at an angle. It doesn’t reflect everything, but what it does reflect, it shows unflinchingly. It speaks for those of us who grew up in households where emotional logic bent under the weight of delusion, where affection coexisted with erasure, and where the gradual dissolution of someone else’s mind quietly altered our own.

This is a memoir for anyone grieving a loved one who still stands beside them. Marin Sardy gives language to what is so often left unspoken: that there is no hard boundary between mental illness and the rest of human experience. And perhaps that’s why her writing feels so revelatory, because for some of us, that blurred boundary was never theoretical.