Mental illness. It can devastate families, sink political careers, become a scarlet letter for life. Unless, of course, you’re an artist. In that case you’re branded “eccentric” and sent on your merry way.
Kurt Vonnegut turned his struggles with depression and suicide into a vital ingredient of his literary identity, his intense prose granting him a certain diplomatic immunity from the rules of “sanity.” His son Mark was more hippie than artist when he went squirrelly in the height of the Vietnam era. He penned a brutally detailed narrative of his long, strange trip, but he still couldn’t plead artist by insanity. He viewed going crazy as the sane response to an insane world. Apocalyptic thoughts in a twisted society, analyzing the Vonnegut mind.
Mark and Kurt Vonnegut will be speaking and signing at the Arthur M. Sackler Art Museum, Harvard University Campus, at 6 p.m..
Guests:
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., writer
Mark Vonnegut, pediatrician and author of “The Eden Express”