Award Presented by ForeWord Publisher, Victoria Sutherland

This year’s Editor’s Choice award is a beautiful tale of one sister’s fear, despair, hope and love for another through the stressful and painful adjustments their family must make to reach acceptance of sudden-onset schizophrenia. A story with wide-audience appeal, it is poignantly touching while at the same time revealing in the laugh-out-loud antics that help keep her and her relations from falling into self-pity.

An insightful look into one family’s way of dealing with the tragic implications of mental disease, this narrative makes its presence with its staccato flow, believable dialogue and – even more so – real characters. The pacing is sporty; the voice is fresh, the metaphors imaginative, the descriptions detailed. In fact, the use of imperfect grammar lends credence to the action of the story, and the simplicity of description has allowed the author to recreate a circus-like family environment that readers can relate to and readily understand; a feat that seems deceptively simple until attempted.

Finally, there are two important, exciting perspectives worth noting. First, this is a debut novel. Secondly, for the first time, a print on demand title has won the Editor’s Choice Prize for Fiction 2005. That book is A Multitude of Mercies, published through iUniverse by Fay Freimuth.

Acceptance speech from Author Fay Freimuth

Thank you so much for this honor. This was a huge undertaking. I got the first kernel of an idea through my relationship with my sister. I talked to her about it and asked if it would be okay if I used some of her experiences to write a book. She was all for it.

I was very afraid at first that I wouldn’t finish it because it seemed daunting to write an entire novel. I’ve often wondered how people do that. So, I started sending out email chapters to people, imperfect as they were, to keep myself accountable. I want to thank all of those early readers.

I want to thank my wonderful family. They’re crazy, literally, but I love them. That’s what made this book so special. I tried my hardest to make it real. My mother suffers from mental illness and I want to thank her for not taking any kind of offense. At one point I was told I needed to make her character more real because she had a lot of potential. I’d been hesitant because I was so afraid of offending her by the things I needed to put in the book. So I called her and told her I needed to beef up the mother character. I said, “Mom, what can you give me?”

So, she gave me all these stories about the crazy things she’d done in her life. I also want to thank my father for his support. I love him so much! And, I want to thank everyone at Foreword Magazine. They told me it would be worth my while to come.

I questioned myself so many times as I was writing this what my motives were. It was a lot of work! I have four daughters who seem to have a highly developed Mommy radar tracking system. It seemed almost impossible sometimes to be alone enough to write this. No matter where I’d hide, they’d find me. Sometimes I wrote amidst pounding on the door, dinner in the oven, spilled milk, and in the midst of endless Barbies and dirty laundry at my feet. I never knew when inspiration would hit me, but I learned to run with it, literally. Sometimes I had to leap out of the shower to capture a thought. Sometimes I had to leave the dishes, wiping my sudsy hands off on my pants as I ran upstairs to the computer chasing another inspiration. Somehow we all survived and I then discovered that writing it had been the easy part. Getting it published proved more of an emotional ride as the rejection slips rolled in. Then I’d wonder why on earth I was putting myself through this.

It was also hard to know if it was truly good. I cried while writing it, put my soul into it, but did that make my book worthy? Sure, my parents loved it, but you just never know about something like this. I suspected it was good. At times I believed it was very good. I never doubted for a moment that I was writing it alone. My sister died when I was only halfway through writing it, and my book was about her life. So, amidst writing about her life, I also had to learn to cope with her death. But, after her death, when I was able to pick it up again, writing suddenly became easier. I became more eloquent in my wording. I wrote things that stunned me. At those times I knew she was standing over my shoulder, gently nudging along a novel that a stay at home mom with four kids had the audacity to believe she could write.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about why I wrote it.I wrote it because I wanted people to truly understand something they only think they do. To them Schizophrenia is a scary word. It’s a word people use in jokes. It means crazy or dangerous people. It means mental institutions and hearing voices. I wanted to change that perception and show what it truly means to a family having to cope with this heartbreaking disease. And I wanted people to realize we aren’t so different. In my book, uncle Theo says, “There’s all kinds of crazy. Laura’s just has a name and a medication for it. The rest of us just do the best we can.” So, I wrote about my wacky family and didn’t pull any punches. I think I even hurt my own feelings a couple times. The people around me formed the strands that knit this story together.

Some people are given a calling in life. My sister was one of those strong, amazing people. She was here to teach the rest of us. She was only here a short while, though, and was shy. At times, she thought she had no friends, but there were more people at her funeral than I had ever seen. There were people literally standing at the back and crowding into the halls. She touched so many lives without even realizing it. I didn’t want her short time here to go unnoticed by those who weren’t fortunate enough know her. And that’s why I wrote this book, as a thank you to my wonderful sister, Leah Ann Harvey.