Krissy Kneen

Malamok, the octopus god, I blurt out, then turning away, there, that's enough.

Okay, that is funny.

This incredible internal dialogue that's going on and then out of his mouth, out of Tom's mouth, come the words that the octopus god wants him to say.

which make him sound incredibly crazy, and he's super aware of that.

Everybody else is looking at him like he's mad, but if he doesn't say it, he's going to get tasered, really, by this octopus god that's going to have him squirming on the floor in pain.

So he's put in this position where he has to say what he's told to do, and it's really funny.

I think I've heard that voice.

It is, and I think that it's not all one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

There are people in there, there are nurses in there who actually are caring and concerned for the welfare of the patients, but it just seems that the place is so underfunded and that there are people in there who have been doing it for far too long and who just, you know, basically the only way of dealing with people is to drug them and to drug them with things that are not necessarily going to make them any better.

No, not at all, no.

His experience of this is pretty horrific and through the eyes of his sister as well, you see how incredibly hard it is for her because she loves her brother so much and yet it's just this incredible, you know, constantly having to watch out for him, constantly having to see if he's okay and check in when her own life is

is chaotic and out of control as well.

I know that I actually was really, really close friends with a man who had schizophrenia when I was younger and had all these conversations that I saw reprinted in this book with this guy.

He explained to me that it wasn't mad if you looked at it from his perspective and he told me what his voices were telling him and the fact that it was asking him to do things otherwise terrible things would happen, so we'd have to do these crazy things.

When I spent time with him, I realised that there's this internal logic when you're stuck in this kind of place where you're hearing these voices, and you can't do anything but go with those voices because they seem to make sense of the world to you at that particular point.

So it felt very real for me because I felt like I'd had all of these conversations before with my friend.

It is quite surprising and it is something that makes the whole book and his whole journey really worthwhile in the end.

It's a very human look at dealing with this because mental illness, treating stuff with drugs is really a trial and error system and it's not perfect and it doesn't work for everybody and often there are terrible implications for taking some of these drugs.

And so I think this book deals with it in the absolutely best way possible.

And I just loved the ending.