An April Friday | Reviews

An April Friday. The workday ends. Dusk settles over Brooklyn. From the roof of a building, a man—barefoot, shivering—speaks to us. He tells the story of a rejected child who spent his whole life trying to live with the sense of being "neglected, damaged, cast out." In recounting his life and mental anguish—the medications, the therapists, the losses, the psychiatric hospitals, the suicide attempts, the electroshock—Donald Antrim shows us with unflinching honesty what it means to inhabit that other world. "I belonged to the ranks of the sick from birth itself (…). As children we don't understand that our loneliness and the absence of affection will become our fate, a loneliness we'll carry for life (…). The glass wall—that's what I learned to call this feeling. My friends and I were together, but we weren't together. (…) The world they came from, the world they'd return to—it was foreign to me (…). They felt impossibly distant. What separated us wasn't distance, I thought. It was disconnection."