Natasha Williams’ Memoir The Parts of Him I Kept

The Parts of Him I Kept

Natasha Williams
Apprentice House Press, 2025, $24

If you ever doubt the mental strength and resiliency of humans, read Natasha Williams’s memoir, The Parts of Him I Kept. Her father, Frank, the “him” of the title, is diagnosed early in life as a paranoid schizophrenic with a messiah complex. He meets Judith on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1963, and the two Beatnik artists fall in love and have Natasha (“Tash”). Frank would undergo abrupt mood and character swings throughout his life, once punching Judith’s abdomen while she was pregnant with Natasha. 

Tash always felt at a remove from her mother, and adored her father despite his manic episodes. He justified taking Tash, just eight, to see the film The Exorcist, because he thought she was possessed by the devil (it traumatized her); he then took her to church to see if the priest would conduct an exorcism on her. With his second partner and fellow schizophrenic Barbara, Frank would have five children, fulfilling his messianic urge to spread his seed, but unable to provide them with adequate care. Jackie, his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, was with him when he drove their car off a pier—by accident, he said. He surfaced quickly, but Jackie was trapped underwater for 40 minutes, and was eventually rescued and resuscitated, albeit comatose. Jackie would die a month later after being disconnected from life support. Their other children would be adopted by Barbara’s siblings, as both Frank and Barbara’s mental illnesses endangered the children. 

Frank moved in and out of institutions, and Tash was his lifeline. He underwent many rounds of electroshock therapy, leaned on drugs, and often lived in squalor. He and Barbara inhabited the frayed edges of society; she sometimes turned tricks to pay the bills. Judith’s second partner, Ted, was mentally unstable as well; they would fight violently, in the nude, and make no effort to keep their lovemaking private from Tash.

It’s a tough read, but Williams impressively sets aside self-pity and victimhood. Due to her parents’ mental states and indifference, she had little choice but to be a tough and self-sufficient kid. When she meets Ken, her future husband, the memoir takes a hopeful turn. They marry and have two girls, who Tash takes to visit their grandfather, troubled as he is, believing that they should know him. The question of inherited markers for schizophrenia looms over the next generation.

Tash spends a good deal of her youth on Staten Island, where her mother lives in a large house and rents out rooms to boarders. In part for her studies in molecular biology, she lives in Manhattan and the Berkshires, in Philadelphia with Ken for his degree work (family practice and dermatology), and, repeatedly, in the Hudson Valley. Toward the end of Frank’s life, she bears the responsibility of his well-being, choosing an assisted-living facility equipped to provide him the care he needs, but Frank also faces the realities of isolation, dehumanization, and exposure to other mentally ill patients. He hates it so much that she moves him to an apartment in Kingston and hires the necessary care. There, he has some peace of mind, at least until requiring hospitalization, and then a nursing home with palliative care. 

After his death, Tash tracks down her surviving half-siblings, and organizes video calls with them and some aunts and uncles. It’s never lost on her that her siblings are more likely to be schizophrenic, like her own children. Every situation is different, but Williams, until her father’s death, lived under the shadow of his schizophrenia. She shows us how to handle it with as much grace as possible, and her frankness in the book is a bracing gift.

This article appears in April 2025.