'RESCUING PATTY HEARST' | A review Haunting testament to a child's resilience

The author recalls her life with her mentally ill mother.
By CAROLE GOLDBERG
HARTFORD COURANT
"Rescuing Patty Hearst (Memories from a Decade Gone Mad)" by Virginia Holman (Simon & amp; Schuster, 244 pps., $23)
It's the middle of a moonlit night, and Virginia Holman's mom has just hauled her out of bed and blindfolded her. She drives the 8-year-old deep into the woods and tells her:
"Your job is to get back to the duck blind."
Virginia doesn't want any part of these "night maneuvers," as her mother, Molly Holman, calls them, but she's powerless. Molly hears and believes voices who tell her a "secret war" is coming, and she has been assigned to run a "field hospital" for wounded "war children."
Molly has, in effect, kidnapped Virginia and her baby sister and taken them to her family's ramshackle cabin in the town of Kechotan, with plans to convert the little shack into a kind of MASH unit. She has left her banker husband, Nathan, at their townhouse in Virginia Beach, stockpiled coats and shoes for the war children and painted the cabin's windows black. Molly is on a mission.
Molly is insane.
Living with mental illness
"Rescuing Patty Hearst" is Virginia Holman's chronicle of growing up with a desperately ill mother and a testament to the innate resilience that helps a child survive an appalling situation. Holman identifies herself with Patty Hearst, kidnapped by revolutionaries in 1974, and her mother with Martha Mitchell, "that crazy Southerner." Like Patty, Virginia comes to identify with her captor even while longing to be rescued.
Nathan and Molly's brother's family, who live close by in Kechotan, know something is wrong but at first find it less painful to write it off as just part of Molly's theatrical personality than to face what it really is: schizophrenia growing more florid by the day. So for a time they let the girls live alone with her.
There are bad days and not-so-bad ones. Sometimes Molly gets it together enough so that she and the girls can spend time with their aunt, uncle and cousins. She is coherent enough to fend off inquiries from concerned teachers at the local school. Eventually, Nathan quits his job and moves to Kechotan to be with them, and for a time, there's some stability. But Molly's secret war with mental illness will never end, and her own girls are just as wounded by it as the imaginary war children could ever be.
What sets this book apart from similar chronicles is Virginia's voice, that of a brave, smart, tough little girl. On one level, she knows there's something really wrong with her mother. On another, she's intrigued by the secret and flattered to be the only one her mother trusts enough to talk about it.
Coming to terms
For years, Virginia blames her father for not rescuing her. Eventually, she comes to understand that he sought medical and legal help but was stymied by laws meant to protect the rights of the mentally ill unless the family could prove suicidal or homicidal impulses with physical evidence. It took him five years to persuade Molly, beset by voices and hallucinations, to see a psychiatrist, who hospitalized her. For years she is in and out of treatment, but the unraveling is relentless. Finally, she is institutionalized permanently.
Virginia Holman wrote this book in an effort to come to terms with her mother's illness and her father's helplessness and to answer a question she poses to herself: Can I find a way to forgive my mother for being so sick?
The answer is yes, but at great cost, and her book is an unflinching exploration of the ties, however twisted and tangled, that eternally bind a mother and child.