The Perfect Other

November 22, 2021
Leddy debuts with a heartrending account of her older sister’s battle with mental illness. During their childhood in Philadelphia in the 1990s, Leddy saw her sister, Kait, “through the hero-worship lens of a little sister” as an arbiter of all things cool and her unquestioning protector. But as Kait reached adolescence, her joyful personality turned dark and her behavior increasingly frightening—such as one night when she hit their mother in the face. “Kait’s illness spread in this darkness the way all creeping matter prospers only in the dampest, most hidden places,” Leddy recounts, detailing how, in the years she came of age, her sister, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, “came into madness.” Kait’s behavior eventually escalated, leading to stints in psychiatric hospitals, before she disappeared from the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in January 2014 (an apparent suicide, though her body hasn’t been found). Gutting in its intensity, Leddy’s narrative grapples with the unearned guilt she still carries regarding Kait’s difficult life, but it also celebrates the “exuberantly bright” light her “confident and hilarious” sister once shined upon the people around her. By refusing to allow this to become a story of utter despair, Leddy offers a humanist portrait of the nuances of loving someone with a mental illness. This one isn’t easy, but it’s well worth the effort.

January 1, 2022
Writing this memoir at age 23, Leddy is a year older than her sister Kait was when she disappeared. Thrilled to be a big sister, Kait always included the author in her girlhood adventures, but as they got older, Kait began to experience severe mood swings and violent tendencies. Leddy and her mother lived under a cloud of anxiety and fear. After Kait experienced a traumatic brain injury, she spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals and was ultimately diagnosed with schizophrenia. In January 2014, Kait disappears. Security footage showed her on a bridge, assumed to have jumped, but her body was never recovered. Leddy writes of grief and what it means to no longer have or be a sister and also of resilience, especially her mother's. Leddy's explorations into schizophrenia and its relationship to traumatic brain injury enrich the story and beg comparisons to Susan Cahalan's Brain on Fire (2012), which she references. Not easy reading but exceptionally thoughtful and insightful, this memoir is a testament to Kait, Leddy, and their mother.

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February 1, 2022
In her first book, Leddy reflects on how she came to terms with her schizophrenic sister's death. The author grew up in awe of her older sister, Kait. Yet however much Kait loved her, Kyleigh knew that "I was born a shadow of my sister--paler, blonder, wispier, and more hesitant." Smart, mischievous, and charming, Kait sometimes demonstrated erratic behaviors that emerged as suddenly as they disappeared. But no one thought anything of her antics until she reached adolescence. After the family moved from the small coastal town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, to Philadelphia, Kait's volatility led to expulsion from her Quaker school. In high school, she quickly earned notoriety for her escapades, one of which involved suffering a head injury when she tried to sneak out of a window at her house. She turned violent not long afterward, forcing her parents to send her to a psychiatric hospital, which released her "undiagnosed." Leddy watched in horror as the sister she idolized slipped away from her over the next few years while her parents stood by, feeling helpless. "You think you can get ahead of it, fix it," writes the author. "She's a little girl walking ahead of you, spilling paint from a bucket. You crawl behind her, trying to mop up every spot before it soaks into the fibers of the carpet." More concussive incidents complicated an eventual diagnosis of schizophrenia. In and out of treatment centers, Kait went on personality-changing medication to stop her terrifying rages, but only after she disappeared while walking across a bridge did her broken family realize she had become suicidal. Threading commentary on traumatic brain injury and its relationship to psychiatric disorders throughout, Leddy seeks courageously to "break the stigma" and silence that still surround schizophrenia and similar disorders while paying tribute to the woman whose life so profoundly transformed her own. A moving and deeply felt memoir about family and mental illness.

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