The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness and Baseball
by Nicholas Dawidoff
Published by Pantheon Books
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Reviewed by Patty Inglish
The Crowd Sounds Happy is an eloquent autobiography written with keen awareness and insight by someone that has survived and understood Severe Mental Disorders (SMD) in a parent. Laced with periods of happiness, the disturbing story describes the periodic psychoses of the author’s father that required his family to flee when Nicky was a toddler. Resulting family anxieties haunted his obstacle-filled youth.
Nicky’s forced visitations with an explosive, dangerous parent throughout his youth are devastating to witness. More devastating is his frugal, frustrated mother, cursing him as an ingrate in the next room of their tiny flat, where he can hear every word.
Mom forbade television and snacks, but made room for adventures: trips to the country, baseball games, and summer baseball camp. As a teacher, Mom instilled the love of reading in her children. That and radio led Nicky to develop a loyalty to baseball and the Boston Red Sox that had been his maternal grandfather’s and aunt’s favorites. Nicholas adopted the Sox as more his own more than many fans do their teams. They were his family.
Nickolas spent the bulk of childhood in New Haven, Connecticut during the 1960-70s, witnessing the city’s decline into ruined welfare projects, abandoned schools and factories, street prostitution, pedophiles, and widespread crime. This harsh backdrop hosts the neuroses of families of patients suffering SMDs and the book shows how long-lived these conditions all become.
Nickolas describes how he dealt with the injustices placed into his life by others’ mental illnesses and family-based anxieties that create magical thinking, the need to control, and the drive to please a world of others in order to avoid attack. While some teens turned to TV heroes, Nicholas turned to the Red Sox and sports writing, becoming a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Missouri-based brain research indicates the magnitude of damage done to children’s neurology by parents with unsuccessfully untreated SMDs. Readers from middle school through adult can read The Crowd Sounds Happy to discover strong examples and solutions.
Armchair Interviews says: Powerful and well-written memoir from a child’s point of view.