A Memoir About Friendship and Mental Illness
When Michael Laudor killed his pregnant girlfriend, Caroline Costello, in 1998, it was the kind of story the tabloids eat up: a fall from great heights. Laudor had appeared previously in the press, but as a success, celebrated for having graduated from Yale Law School despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia. A movie of his life was even in the works, to be directed by Ron Howard and star Brad Pitt. But after the killing, the New York Post ran a picture of Laudor on its cover with the headline Psycho. Some saw him as the victim of a disease; others refused to accept that his disorder had anything to do with the horror he had wrought.
For the writer Jonathan Rosen, the murder was a nightmare come true. Laudor had been his best friend since the two were 10 years old. They had grown up together, and Rosen always felt like he was in the shadow of the book-devouring, fast-talking boy who managed to finish college in three years. Laudor’s illness had confounded Rosen. It seemed to live alongside his brilliance. And society didn’t know what to do with the fact of it: institutionalize him or integrate him.
Rosen’s new memoir, , is his attempt to understand the complexity of his relationship with Laudor, as well as the ways of , the book delves into a fraught friendship that even at its brightest moments was tinged with competitiveness, and it also offers—nearly a quarter century after Laudor pleaded insanity and was committed to a psychiatric institution—a deep look at the policies and attitudes that have shaped societal responses to schizophrenia.
