Babette Becker I Should Have Been Music

Annotation

My memoir, I Should Have Been Music, covers the four years I spent on four different mental hospitals from 1957 to 1960. It was a time when little was known about mental illness, except the shame and horror of it, and nothing was known about early childhood trauma. I was passed from hospital to hospital carrying several severe classic diagnostic labels, and I narrowly missed being sent to a State hospital as my final stop, where, if not for luck, I might have been incarcerated for the rest of my life. The memoir follows my progress through these hospitals as well as my progress from psychosis to functioning adult. The book also includes doctors' reports from each of the hospitals, along with poems, letters, short stories, and notes from my journals during those years. These primary source materials reveal the stark contrast between the doctors' portrayal of my experience and the reality of the experience I remember living. I had become a pile of paper reports rather than a person. The narrative, at heart, is the journey of a young woman trying to find herself with remarkably little help.