Quiet Crazy

The sheriff has come to "put away" Elizabeth Miller - to take her to the state mental hospital. "Well, I may be crazy", the 28-year-old Elizabeth tells us, "but I know I'm not wild-crazy, just maybe quiet-crazy, and I don't know which one is worse. Sometimes I wish I could be wild-crazy and scream and holler and go wild. That might feel better than beeping everything all bottled up". Still, for someone about to be penned up with the "crazy folks", you wouldn't think she'd be so calm and analytical. The thing is, Elizabeth Miller knows that her trip to the insane asylum is her last chance at an independent life, her last chance at getting away from Angela - the little dead girl inside her who won't die, and who threatens to take over her life. In the hospital, a sometimes horrific world unto itself, she will find beauty and terror. She will find doctors who may - or may not - help her. Most of all, however, she will find her own inner strength - the strength to heal herself and to face the family and small town she has had to flee. Joyce Durham Barrett's Quiet-Crazy is the uplifting story of one woman who triumphs over a terrible past and wakes up to face the world as an adult: to embrace it in all its complication, its many shades of meaning and uncertainty, its degrees of good and bad, its wild, wonderful, terrifying, thrilling reality.