Rescuing Patty Hearst: Growing Up Sane in a Decade Gone Mad

In 1975, one year after Patty Hearst and her captors robbed Hibernia National Bank, a second kidnapping took place far from the glare of the headlines. Virginia Holman's mother, in the thrall of psychosis, spirited her two daughters to a cottage on the Virginia Peninsula, painted the windows black, and set up the house as a MASH unit for a secret war. A war that never came. The family - captive to a mother's schizophrenia and a legal system that refused to intervene - remained there for more than three years. It is the story of a young girl caught in the whirlwind of madness - a girl who chooses a brainwashed heiress as her role model. Holman's memoir vividly evokes the interior worlds of the sane and the insane and the delicate membrane in between. Virginia Holman is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize.