Book Review: The Parts of Him I Kept by Natasha Williams

 The Parts of Him I Kept by Natasha Williams 

Natasha Williams’s memoir begins with a devastating event: her father drives off a Staten Island pier with her two-year-old half-sister in the car. From there, Williams looks back across a lifetime with a father who lived with schizophrenia and whose love for her was real, even when he could not keep his family safe.

What makes the book compelling is its refusal to turn Francis Williams into either a villain or a saint. He is imaginative, funny, affectionate, and able to make his daughter feel deeply seen. He can also be frightening, unreliable, and consumed by delusions. Williams writes with equal honesty about her own conflicting feelings: devotion and embarrassment, protectiveness and anger, grief and the need to build a life beyond his illness.

The memoir’s short, often vivid chapters move among childhood, adulthood, and her father’s final years. Scenes such as their day clearing jellyfish from a beach give their bond a warmth that makes the later losses more affecting. Williams also examines her mother’s choices, her half siblings, and the strain of becoming a caregiver while raising children of her own. At times, the shifts into research and reflection slow the narrative, but they show how persistently she has tried to understand what happened to her family.

This is an emotionally demanding book, especially in its accounts of a child’s death, neglect, and serious mental illness. Its lasting strength is Williams’s willingness to hold complicated truths together. She loved her father, needed distance from him, and kept discovering parts of him she had never known.


Goodreads Review:  

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/8945218179


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