Moon Flyers – A Family Memoir: Coping With Mental Illness

Moon Flyers
162 Pages
ISBN 9781507699416

Moon Flyers tells the story of a family's struggle with mental illness, a generally misunderstood medical condition. A father and daughter cope with severe depression in two distinct ways, with two dramatically different outcomes. Information and insights from different experiences are there to give direction to others who similarly suffer and hope to the people who love them.

Throughout Moon Flyers are narrative descriptions of stressful family conflicts. Other chapters illustrate that it is possible to manage and survive by finding humor in life's challenges and expressing emotions creatively.

Each section begins with a quote to relate to the following narrative, for example: "That's the thing about depression: The fog is like a cage without a key" or "Children are a great comfort in your old age and they help you reach it faster, too." The author describes how she and her daughter survived a trip titled, "Murphy's Law, an observation that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." Another humorous episode happened in a hospital.

Barbara Paper

About Barbara Paper (Chattanooga, Tennessee Author)

Barbara Paper

Barbara V. Paper is a native of Mobile, Alabama. After graduating from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa with a BSEd, she returned home to teach elementary school. Now Chattanooga, Tennessee is her home.

The author’s interest in writing started to take shape in high school, which led to her choosing to concentrate in college English studies. The development of Moon Flyers, A Family Memoir: Coping With Mental Illness, began after writing several short stories about her immediate family’s experiences.

Barbara is a member of the Chattanooga Writers’ Guild and attends bi-monthly meetings of the North Georgia Writers Group. Since completing Moon Flyers, she continues to write short stories. Two of her stories won honorable mention in the 2015 Writers’ Guild Spring Writing Contest in both categories, fiction and non-fiction.

In addition to writing, Barbara’s other avocation is genealogy. She is a member of Ancestry.com and has extensive records of her family’s history from her research. One branch of her father’s family has roots back to the 1800s in Mobile. Her second great-grandparents’ home currently is the Mobile Carnival Museum. Henry, Bertha, and Ralph, Barbara’s essay about the home and its resident ghost, is featured on her Facebook Page: Barbara V. Paper-Author.