Author Bio

Natasha Williams has worked as an adjunct biology professor at SUNY Ulster in the Hudson Valley of New York and as a consultant for the International Public-School Network, coaching science teachers. She has an MA from the University of Pennsylvania. In the summer of 2020, she continued working on the manuscript summers at the Bread Loaf School of English and at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 2023. Excerpts of The Parts of Him I Kept, forthcoming April 2025 from Apprentice House Press, have been published in the Bread Loaf Journal, Change Seven, LIT, Memoir Magazine, Onion River Review, Writers Read, Post Road, and South Dakota Review.

Target Audience

In the midst of today’s unprecedented mental health crisis, with 1 in 20 adults suffering severe mental illness and 1 in 6 young adults experiencing a mental health disorder, an estimated 5.86% of adults in the United States experienced a severe mental illness.

Additionally, there are an even larger number of mental health adjacent readers: family members, therapists, social workers and mental health educators who will resonate with the ways The Parts of Him I Kept humanizes living with mental illness and illuminates how families find hope, and even thrive in the face of the extraordinary challenge of mental illness.

Book Summary

The Parts of Him I Kept is an intimate account of a daughters coming of age in the face of her father’s schizophrenic unraveling. Williams investigates the limits of our medical and cultural understanding of schizophrenia while chronicling the shared burden and benefits of caring for a mentally ill family member. In the tradition of Michael Greenberg’s Hurry Down Sunshine and Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, The Parts of Him I Kept asks us to consider the ways mental illness is as much a social issue as a biological condition.

One cold night in April, Natasha’s father drove his car into the frigid water of New York Bay with her two-year-old half-sister in the backseat. Natasha was twenty-one. She was the one to walk him past the column of hungry reporters demanding an explanation.

The headline in The New York Post read: Back from a Watery Grave.

But Natasha’s experiences growing up with her schizophrenic father in the gritty New York City of the 1970s are not so easily captured in a single headline. How could she possibly convey the power of her father’s love in the face of this tragedy?

Author Questions 

1. You touched on this a bit in “The Parts of Him I Kept”, but what inspired you to write this memoir?
2. You mentioned that your mother wanted to read the book. Has she, or any other members of your family read it yet?
3. When was the first moment you remember realizing your father was different?
4. Looking back, are there any moments from your childhood you view differently now, knowing the full extent of your father’s illness?
5. The climax of your memoir was the night your father tragically drove off a pier, and all the devastating events that followed with your sister. How has your understanding of that night changed, both as you aged, and as you reflected on it to write this memoir?
6. You and your husband raised two daughters. How has your childhood affected your parenting style?
7. What was the hardest part in writing your memoir?
8. I’m sure there were many memorable moments in your life growing up with a schizophrenic father and an absent mother in the 70s. How did you decide what did and didn’t get included in your memoir?
9. At the end of the book, you mentioned getting in touch with your half-siblings just before the pandemic. Are you still in touch? What do they think of this portrayal of the father they’ve never known?
10. If you could pick one thing for your readers to take away from “The Parts of Him I Kept”, what would you pick?