The Georgie Gust Exhibit

I'm Jonathan Harnisch and This Is What It's Like to Live With Schizophrenia

I'm Jonathan Harnisch and This Is What It's Like to Live With Schizophrenia

Depression is a mood disorder causing a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest.

Ben Schreiber knew Wakefield Academy would be a disaster before he even arrived. It would be the same as his last school--the taunting, the judgment, the panic at being an all-too-obvious schizophrenic in a crowd of teenage brats hungry for a target. His fears are confirmed the moment he steps out of his parent's rusty car to the mocking sneers of his posh classmates. So what does Ben do? He retreats into himself, allowing the second being within his body to rise to consciousness--Georgie Gust, an angry, resentful, Tourette's-ridden personality, suspicious of everyone and trusting of none. Georgie navigates Wakefield campus within the smog of self-hate. He hates how his body twitches and his words betray him, hates how his odd walk brings cruel laughter, hates the stares that follow him when he tries to disappear. Georgie quickly attracts a crowd of tormenters lead by a cocky lacrosse player, Ozer. It's Claudia, however--Ozer's beautiful and troubled girlfriend--who captures Georgie's attention. Claudia alone does not join in with her friends' jeers, choosing instead to come to Georgie in friendship, her own demons lurking just beneath skin's surface. Though Georgie fights to believe no one can ever understand him, Claudia does. She is there when he drinks himself into a stupor every night and shows up for class hungover; she is there when he is harassed and beaten by their peers; she is there when his academic brilliance begins to gleam, nurtured by the support of the philosophy professor, Heidi. It is for fear of hurting Claudia that Georgie begins to care for himself; he stops drinking, throws out his cigarettes, and devotes himself to the pursuit of a prestigious scholarship. But nothing is ever so easy. As Georgie begins to heal beneath Claudia's warmth, he fails to see her own troubles. For how could someone so beautiful, smart, and well-liked know what suffering is? Surely, her problems run only so deep as her cheating boyfriend and exam stress. It is Heidi, the philosophy professor, who calls Georgie out on his selfishness. On the edge of a cliff, Heidi accuses Georgie of choosing hatred and isolation, of rejecting the love of others because hate is easier than accountability. Georgie both wants to be loved and desperately fears it. Georgie's defenses, while justified, are selfish ones, and they lead him to miss the warning signs in the one person he loves. One morning Claudia is gone, and it is Georgie who finds her broken body twisted in a tree on that same cliff where Heidi scolded him. So selfishly had he thought he was the only one with illness; she had understood him better than he ever knew. Claudia's death both destroys and saves him. It is for her that Georgie chooses to use his illness rather than hate it; for her, that he laughs at his absurdities instead of fall victim to them; for her that he opens his life and ultimately wins the scholarship. In the end, it is what Georgie thought impossible that leads him out of the darkness: acceptance. If only he'd recognized it before she chose to die.

Of Crime and Passion by Jonathan Harnisch

Book Reviewed by Blue Ink in February, 2016:

Jonathan Harnisch is at his best in bruising, direct confrontations with schizophrenia, PTSD and the other maladies that afflict him. The 803-page Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography and his essays on mental illness are affecting cries of a wounded heart. This slim novella is less successful. While the prolific New Mexico writer's trademark empathy and emotion are on full display, Harnisch here reveals an uncertain grasp of character development and weaknesses for stilted diction and peculiar story flow. His protagonist is a scheming poor boy named John Marshall (he may or may not have been born “Juan Marcinel”) who sets out to take revenge on the rich through a series of seductions in wealthy households. Harnisch sheds little light on John's grievance (the moneyed Roman and Sinclair families are actually quite good to him), but he does carry around a picture of Che Guevara and claims, with no evidence, to live by “revolutionary philosophies.” But he also inexplicably spouts Bible verses in fluent Latin and is impressed by opulence: “I stare in open-mouthed awe at the palatial town home.” Harnisch's language ranges from the archaic (“My father gives us leave until supper” to the outlandish (“You are my master, I am your slave”), and his plotting is often puzzling: A rich patron John has gravely wronged offers him a business partnership; a mistress he shoots in a church takes no offense whatsoever. Harnisch has indicated that he writes only when sleepless and symptomatic. As a result, his demons are often evident: A full, 12-page chapter outline of the book precedes the actual text, and the obsessive interruption “smoke break” appears again and again in the latter pages. Jonathan Harnisch is a gifted writer. Unfortunately, this is a lesser effort.

Freak by Jonathan Harnisch

Book Reviewed by Blue Ink in February, 2016:

Jonathan Harnisch’s new novel brings back Georgie Gust, who has served along with alter ego Ben Schreiber as the author’s stand-in in other semi-autobiographical works that explore the traumas of characters afflicted, like their author, with Tourette’s syndrome and schizophrenia. Freak is a more conventional coming-of-age story than the surreal mash-up of reality, fiction, and fantasy found in Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography and Living Colorful Beauty: Georgie has been toned down from sexual fetishist to troubled teen, while the oft-appearing Claudia Nesbitt, once a scary dominatrix, is now a sympathetic classmate at a New England boarding school. In classic Bildungsroman fashion, Georgie begins his journey in a swamp of self-absorption and self-pity—with good reason, since most of his fellow students mock his physical tics and resent that only he and Claudia understand the ideas being explored in Heidi Berillo’s unconventional philosophy course. Both Claudia and Heidi encourage Georgie to embrace his intellectual gifts with the same energy he devotes to self-destructive drinking and acting out. Georgie is taking tentative steps along that path when a tragedy involving Claudia jolts him into the realization that his are not the only sorrows in the world. Freak marks new territory for this gifted writer, as he leads his protagonist haltingly towards maturity. It would be nice if he had given Claudia and Heidi the same kind of development: the latter is a textbook nurturing mentor, while the former signals her suicidal longings so consistently you wonder how Georgie could possibly miss them. Some familiar Harnisch gambits—Ben’s role as an antic narrator blurring the boundaries between memory and invention; narrative asides by someone who might be Georgie or might be the author—seem less appropriate here than they did in earlier books. Still, missteps are bound to occur when exploring new territory, and it’s refreshing to see Harnisch expanding his—and his protagonist’s—horizons beyond the self.

Jonathan Harnisch has proclaimed himself the King of Mental Illness. A schizophrenic with Tourette's, he often feels like a twisted character treading in an otherwise ordinary world. It comes as both a shock and a familiar feeling, then, when he discovers that a friend and fellow author has written him into her book. Seeking to displace the perhaps one-dimensional image created of him, Harnisch sets out to write his own account of the characters that have ruled his life—bare, raw, and endlessly revealing. Glad You're Not Me is a rarely seen, shocking account of living with schizophrenia. Written in chaotic vignettes that resonate to the same frequency as William Burrough's Naked Lunch, the pages leap from bitter honesty to barbed defenses to deeply disturbing pornographic fantasy. Harnisch's disturbed, arrogant, and brutally authentic voice is unapologetic in its obscenities and dangerous desires, for mental illness comes with no filter—it is dark, it is troubling, it leads its audience into confusing places. To censor the words within this book would strip it of its integrity, for the reader must see, however horrible, the truth of illnesses of the mind.

Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. People with schizophrenia may seem like they have lost touch with reality. Although schizophrenia is not as common as other mental disorders, the symptoms can be very disabling.

Equal parts existential nihilism and fetishistic erotica, this darkly hypnotic novel--in which the lines between reality and delusion are hopelessly blurred--chronicles a mentally ill man's search for meaning in his life, or at least some kind of profound corporeal satisfaction.Georgie Gust, who has Tourette's syndrome and may be schizophrenic, is also a hardcore masochist and foot fetishist and believes that finding the "everlasting orgasm" is what he needs to change his life. The son of independently wealthy parents, Gust has frequented kinky sex clubs for years without any real fulfillment. But when he becomes enamored with his next-door neighbor--a middle-aged paramedic named Claudia--he offers to pay her to be his torturer, his "personal trainer in pain."But the fiery redhead takes her job a little too seriously and the humiliation quickly escalates to brutal, life-threatening assaults. His alluring dominatrix with the "perfect, long, skinny toes" is quickly transformed into a psychotic madwoman who is systematically destroying his life: "...that bitch, that whore, that woman I love and hate. She created a paradise and then set it aflame. She is my world and its end, my kinky sex goddess, my creepy-crawly nemesis."The brilliance of this storyline--and it is brilliant--is in the author's use of the unreliable narrator. The novel begins with Gust in a psych ward after an apparent suicide attempt. As his story unfolds, the reader is introduced to Ben, who may be Gust's limo driver, a figment of his imagination, or an alter ego. The reader is never quite sure until the very end -- when a bombshell revelation turns the entire narrative upside down.Lover in the Nobody is a poignant exploration into the world of mental illness that is simultaneously deeply disturbing and salaciously spellbinding. It is sure to resonate with readers long after the last page is turned.-- BlueInk Review