My lobotomy

Howard Dully is twelve when Dr. Walter Freeman performs a transorbital lobotomy on him, the procedure often called the ice pick lobotomy. He is an ordinary boy: moody, messy, rowdy with his brothers, and often at odds with his parents. He becomes one of the youngest people to undergo the operation.

Within a year of the surgery his family abandons him. He spends his teens in mental institutions, his twenties in jail, and his thirties drinking. Only in his forties does he steady himself and start building a life, and one question stays with him: the reason this was done to him.

Only three people could answer it: Freeman, his stepmother Lou, who brought him to the doctor's attention, and his father, Rodney. Freeman and Lou are dead, and Rodney is the one left. Howard begins searching while time is short.

He meets other lobotomy patients and their families, talks with one of Freeman's sons, and confronts Rodney about his part in it. In the archive that holds Freeman's files, he reads the records of his own case. Entries from 1960 appear in the text.

This memoir, written with Charles Fleming, is also a work of history about how mental illness was treated. It is frank about a painful childhood, a wasted youth and the long effort to recover a life taken away. The tone is candid and often hard, and it ends on recovery.