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  • Published: 15 April 2020
  • ISBN: 9781784709075
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $24.99

Let Me Not Be Mad

A Story of Unravelling Minds




A non-fiction literary psycho-thriller about a clinical neuropsychologist’s descent into madness with an ingenious and shocking twist

Let Me Not Be Mad is an immersive, virtuosic and provocative investigation of madness, love and self-destruction that defies categorisation.

'Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat' Guardian

'I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness' Stephen Fry

A consulting room with two people in it. One of them is talking, the other is listening. Both of them need help.
Throughout his life, A. K. Benjamin has found himself drawn to extreme behaviour: as a contemplative monk, an advocate for homeless addicts, a support-worker for gang members and for many years as a Clinical Neuropsychologist.

His book begins as a series of clinical encounters with anonymised patients. But with each encounter, it becomes increasingly and disturbingly apparent that what we are reading is not really about the patients – it is, instead, about the author’s own fevered descent into mental illness as he confronts his traumatic past.

'Stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest' Olivia Laing

'Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind' Stewart Lee

  • Published: 15 April 2020
  • ISBN: 9781784709075
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

A K Benjamin

A K Benjamin is a Clinical Neuropsychologist, specialising in diagnostics and acute rehab. Previously he was a screenwriter, spent two years as a contemplative monk and has worked at a number of NGOs, with homeless addicts, with gangs and with children with acquired and congenital neurological conditions. A K Benjamin is not his real name.

Also by A K Benjamin

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Praise for Let Me Not Be Mad

Brilliant and alarming, written with cunning and self-lacerating honesty. The doctor is sick, but his intelligence, his scope of reference, his damaged sagacity could save us all

Iain Sinclair

Let Me Not be Mad is stunning: clever, troubling, restless, honest, dishonest; one of the best portraits of madness and clinical practice I’ve read. I read it in two sittings. Extraordinary

Olivia Laing

A treasure of a book. Intricately woven and deeply intimate, it reveals things that astonish, surprise and improve us

James Rhodes, author of Instrumental

A perfectly extraordinary – not to mention extraordinarily perfect – tense Hitchcockian psychodrama. I have rarely read a more haunting and enthralling account of a descent into madness. An important, profound and fascinating book

Stephen Fry

Imagine a gonzo Oliver Sacks communing with Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose, R.D. Laing and the spirit of Kafka’s 'The Country Doctor', and you still won’t quite have the flavour of this wild and strikingly original book

William Fiennes

Blackly comic, warmly compassionate, a unique take on the human mind offering uncomfortable universal truths

Stewart Lee

A truly astonishing journey into and out of the mind. Not content to pin you down with the intense intimacy of his storytelling Benjamin dramatises some of the most profound and intractable issues in neuroscience and psychiatry. I’ve never read anything like it

Professor Mark Lythgoe, UCL

At first I thought this an exceptionally well written book in the genre of medical story telling. The more I read the more I realised it’s an exceptional book in a genre all of its own. Insightful, wonderfully well observed and beautifully written

Suzanne O'Sullivan, author of It's All in Your Head

Exhilarating ... dazzling ... a miraculous feat

Guardian

A mental-health memoir like no other … a genre-defying wake-up call of a book … compelling … clever humane … holding back a sly twist for the end

Observer

A slow-burn belter of a book ... terrific ... so finely described, the result has the terse force of a classic short story

Spectator

Strange, claustrophobic, haunting … a dizzying whirlpool

Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

Like a meeting of Oliver Sacks and Hunter S Thompson … this is not a simple narrative of striking cases written by a far-seeing practitioner. It’s a turbo-charged race

Lisa Appignanesi, New Statesman

Brilliant and engrossing

Roddy Doyle

Along the way the anonymised author, AK Benjamin, offers funny and unsettling insights into the vagaries of the relationship between clinicians and patients

Colin Grant, New Statesman, *Books of the Year*