Jonathan Rosen’s new book tells the story of the author’s relationship with Michael Laudor, a childhood friend whose life became defined by his mental illness. Growing up together in New Rochelle, New York’s Jewish community, the two forged a friendship that saw many twists and turns.
Laudor might be a familiar name to readers: he garnered some fame in the 1990s after a New York Times article profiled his experiences as a Yale Law School graduate who suffered from schizophrenia, which led to book deals and a contract for a biopic with Ron Howard. As Rosen documents, however, what was supposed to be a narrative of mental illness and mental health care reform came crashing down when Laudor murdered his pregnant fiancée, Carrie Costello, during a paranoid delusion, catapulting him from fame to infamy.
The Best Minds follows Laudor’s story but extends beyond just one man’s tragedy. Rosen provides a fascinating overview of “madness” in the broadest possible sense. Art, literature, pop culture, medical science, and the justice system gave Rosen’s generation conflicting (and often unhealthy) understandings of insanity. For example, theorists like Michel Foucault and Franz Fanon — along with artists of the Beat Generation — described madness as a social construct that could actually liberate individuals from the oppressive conformity of normality. On the other hand, Rosen chronicles the history of psychiatric lockup, lobotomies, and the advent of psychiatry as a medical practice, which stigmatized (and in some cases criminalized) severe mental illness.
Readers might find some of the anecdotes and chapter themes circuitous. But by the book’s end, it becomes clear how the sociohistorical background and biographical information fit together, providing readers with a nuanced discussion of mental illness in American society. Though the memoir’s Jewish themes sometimes take a backseat to the discussion of mental illness, Rosen — the son of Holocaust survivors — suggests connections between these public-facing narratives and the generational trauma of being Jewish in a post-Holocaust world.
With all the fascinating context that The Best Minds deploys to tell Michael’s tragic story, it is unfortunate that so few of the book’s five hundred-plus pages are devoted to Carrie Costello, the partner Michael stabbed to death. Toward the end of the book, Rosen himself acknowledges this:, “I kept thinking that Michael himself had been murdered, and when I caught myself in the mistake, I felt confused and guilty. I wondered if killing was in itself a kind of death. But behind that speculation was the pregnant woman he had actually killed, strangely eclipsed by the personal horror her death aroused in me.” Michael was failed by many institutions, but Carrie and her unborn child deserve to be remembered, too.
Leah Grisham, PhD, is a Cleveland-based writer. Her first book, Heroic Disobedience, was published in 2023. She is currently working on a new book about the Holocaust. Catch up with her at leahshewrote.com
