The Best Minds

November 1, 2022

Rosen tells the story of his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, who graduated summa cum laude from college, then suffered a psychotic break that landed him in a psychiatric hospital with the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. As reported in the New York Times and a memoir whose film rights were acquired by Ron Howard, Michael overcame adversity and graduated from Yale Law School. Then, as his illness resurfaced, he stabbed his devoted girlfriend Carrie Costello to death. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from February 27, 2023
In this dazzling memoir, essayist Rosen (The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature) chronicles his thorny relationship with his childhood friend Michael Laudor, a lawyer and disability rights advocate who made headlines in 1998 for murdering his fiancée during a paranoid episode. The boys met as neighbors in a tight-knit New Rochelle, N.Y., Jewish community and attended Yale University together. Laudor graduated in three years but quickly began having delusions, carrying a baseball bat to bed at his parents’ house because he believed they’d been replaced by Nazis. He was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and Rosen traces Laudor’s cycles of recovery and relapse with an empathetic but still circumspect eye, charting the impact of Laudor’s disease on others, including his law school dean, rabbi, and the officer who arrested him after the murder. Rosen also takes a sweeping look at shifting views on mental illness, from the political revolutionaries of the 1970s who aligned an open embrace of mental illness with communist philosophy to the deinstitutionalization trend of the ’80s. This lands as both a breathtaking and tragic portrait of a man with vast potential and a reckoning on how schizophrenia is treated and understood. This is a tough one to forget. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, William Morris Endeavor.

April 15, 2023
This true story is not a happily-ever-after tale about someone conquering mental illness. Instead, Rosen shares the tragic life of his close childhood friend, Michael Laudor. The brilliant boy grew up to be a 6-foot-3 genius who graduated summa cum laude from Yale. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Still, he attended Yale law school, then landed a $2.1 million book-and-movie deal about his life and moved to New Rochelle with his sweet, petite girlfriend, Carrie, who accepted it when he told her about his mental illness. According to Michael, Carrie's parents weren't happy that their daughter was in love with a Jewish man with schizophrenia. It turned out they were right to worry. Michael stopped taking his medication, suffered from more severe delusions, and ultimately thought Carrie, by then his fianc�e, was a robot or doll who had been sent to torture and kill him and fatally stabbed her. In this well-written, affecting account, Rosen notes that a Yale forensic psychologist said Michael showed how "we get lulled by successful people" and fail to understand the severity of mental illness.

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Starred review from March 1, 2023
An account of a brilliant young man brought down by schizophrenia, with lives shattered all around him. The subject of Rosen's book, Michael Laudor, had a capacious and wide-ranging mind, taking in higher learning and popular culture alike. "Michael and I grew up in a Norman Rockwell painting," writes the author. In fact, Rockwell lived in and set paintings in their town, a suburban idyll. Laudor and Rosen excelled while living out a late baby boomer existence in academic homes among Holocaust survivors, yet with ominous shadows on the horizon. As Rosen writes, "the culture had prepared us for David Berkowitz," the poster child for mental illness presented as satanic evil. Laudor was somewhat late in manifesting the schizophrenic break that would require his institutionalization, though, reflecting on events, Rosen sees warning signs such as "a mysterious habit of spending whole days in his room with the lights out." Having worked in law and business while budding writer Rosen studied English literature, Laudor decided that he, too, wanted to be an author, leading to encounters with the publishing and film industries that may well have accelerated his final psychotic break, one that culminated in homicide. Rosen captures many worlds in this attentive, nuanced narrative, evoking boyhood discovery, the life of post-Shoah Jews in America, the rise of predatory capitalism, and the essential inability of one friend to comprehend fully the "delicate brain" of the other. It's an undeniably tragic story, but Rosen also probes meaningfully into the nature of mental illness. Throughout, he is keenly sensitive, as when he writes of the perils of self-awareness, "The flip side of the idea that writing heals you, perhaps, was the fear that failing to tell your story, and fulfill your dreams, cast you into outer darkness." An affecting, thoughtfully written portrait of a friendship broken by mental illness and its terrible sequelae.

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