Book: The Looking Glass Brother by Peter von Ziegesar

A Memoir....

Big Peter von Ziegesar grew up in an affluent family in the northeast. His parents divorced and remarried. His father's remarriage brought with it a couple of his new wife's children, including Little Peter. This non-fiction account of the two Peters and their families is original, sad, funny and (I think) as honest as the author could tell the story.

Little Peter was a physically lovely child and musically talented, but as he becomes a teenager, he also becomes mentally ill, or at least that was the perception of most of society. He enters and leaves multiple treatments, both residential and outpatient. He survives on the streets somehow but is an addict and often gets in trouble with various law enforcers. He travels here and there, usually on buses. He sleeps on sidewalks and in parks; he eats out of dumpsters. He occasionally is explosively violent, but much more often is a fairly gentle soul with some insight into his fractured life. He is not exactly abandoned by his mother and sister but they eventually become weary. There is almost nothing about his biologic father, and his stepfather is too self-absorbed to pay more than token attention now and then...to any of his children, step or otherwise.

So one day, after years of no contact, Little Peter telephones his step-brother, Big Peter. The book tells of the next few years with many reminisces of lazy summers on Long Island with wealthy, self-indulgent grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, and various parental combinations, who vaguely and off-handedly raise this youngest generation, sometimes there, but more often not in any real way. They were not the most highly evolved people with regards to sanity and morality.

Big Peter is now an adult with wife and children of his own, living in Manhattan, successful enough, but not without his own jagged edges.

This book is about all of the above with the main theme Big Peter's presence in Little Peter's life, his compassion, his attempts to "help" his brother with the implications of how nature versus nurture affect us.