Jason Thompson

In September 1944, Stella Marie Thompson, the daughter of an American soldier and an Irish dressmaker, was adopted by a working-class couple in Kilkeel, Northern Ireland. Forty years later, Stella underwent a radical personality transformation, following which her family fell apart. Stella’s first son Jason Thompson, an Oxford University graduate, became obsessed in his twenties with penetrating the enigma of his mother’s metamorphosis from the loving figure he remembered in his childhood to the raging madwoman who succeeded her. Unable either to connect with his mother or fully let go of her, he became paralyzed, ultimately succumbing to major depression. But then, tracing his mother’s story through Stella’s elliptical poetry, family letters and documents, and his own imagination – and tracking down Stella’s biological parents to a small town in Massachusetts – Jason ultimately succeeded in burying the ghost of his lost mother. STELLA tells that story. Likely to appeal to readers who have enjoyed the work of Augusten Burroughs and Dave Eggers, STELLA is an emotionally compelling literary memoir that will resonate with anyone who has lived with a difficult parent or dealt with mental illness. By turns ironic and dark, the book is at once an intense and gripping account of one of the strangest families you will ever encounter; the portrait of an Irish Catholic mother whose mysterious illness provides a fascinating glimpse into the bizarre world of severe personality disorder; and the story of her son whose quest to understand her took him from a small English city to Asia, America, the jungles of Papua New Guinea and the furthest frontiers of his own psyche. Jason Thompson lives in San Francisco. He writes regularly about mental health issues at his blog, www.neurotransmission.org.