Eva Langston and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Natasha Williams, author of The Parts of Him I Kept, about parenting her father through schizophrenia and healing through memoir writing.
The Parts of Him I Kept is an intimate account of a daughter’s coming of age in the face of her father’s schizophrenic unraveling. Williams investigates the limits of our medical and cultural understanding of schizophrenia while chronicling the shared burden and benefits of caring for a mentally ill family member. The Parts of Him I Kept asks us to consider the ways mental illness is as much a social issue as a biological condition.
Natasha Williams has worked as an adjunct biology professor at SUNY Ulster in the Hudson Valley of New York and as a consultant for the International Public-School Network, coaching science teachers. She has an MA from the University of Pennsylvania. She attended the Bread Loaf School of English in the summer of 2020 and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2023. Excerpts of The Parts of Him I Kept, published in April 2025 from Apprentice House Press, have been published in the Bread Loaf Journal, Change Seven, LIT, Memoir Magazine, Onion River Review, Writers Read, Post Road, and South Dakota Review.
