An Evening with Natasha Williams
Discussing Her Debut Book, The Parts of Him I Kept
Sunday, October 26, 2025
4:00 - 6:00 PM
Blue Heron Books
High Falls, NY
William’s memoir, The Parts of Him I Kept, is an intimate account of a daughter’s 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 Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous and Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, this is one family’s story that asks us to consider the ways mental illness is as much a social issue as a biological condition and illuminates ways we find hope and even thrive in the face of the extraordinary challenge of mental illness.
This is Natasha Williams’ debut book. She has an MA from the University of Pennsylvania and attended the Bread Loaf School of English and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Excerpts and essays have been published in the Bread Loaf Journal, Change Seven, LIT, Memoir Magazine, Onion River Review, Writers Digest, Writers Read, Post Road, and South Dakota Review.
“Natasha Williams offers us a portrait of America at a time when everything was in flux, when people searched for new ways to live, and (if they were lucky) ended up simply loving each other.”
– Nick Flynn, Author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and Low life
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"An engrossing debut memoir."
- Kirkus Reviews