My Lobotomy, Charles Fleming
My Lobotomy, Charles Fleming
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My Lobotomy
A Memoir

Author: Charles Fleming, Howard Dully

Narrator: Johnny Heller

Unabridged: 9 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/14/2007


Synopsis

A gut-wrenching memoir by a man who was lobotomized at the age of twelve.

Assisted by journalist/novelist Charles Fleming, Howard Dully recounts a family tragedy whose Sophoclean proportions he could only sketch in his powerful 2005 broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered.

"In 1960," he writes, "I was given a transorbital, or 'ice pick' lobotomy. My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some 'tests.' It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars." Fellow doctors called Freeman's technique barbaric: an ice pick–like instrument was inserted about three inches into each eye socket and twirled to sever connections from the frontal lobe to the rest of the brain. The procedure was intended to help curb a variety of psychoses by muting emotional responses, but sometimes it irreversibly reduced patients to a childlike state or (in 15 percent of the operations Freeman performed) killed them outright. Dully's ten-minute "test" did neither, but in some ways it had a far crueler result, since it didn't end the unruly behavior that had set his stepmother against him to begin with.

"I spent the next forty years in and out of insane asylums, jails, and halfway houses," he tells us. "I was homeless, alcoholic, and drug-addicted. I was lost." From all accounts, there was no excuse for the lobotomy. Dully had never been "crazy," and his (not very) bad behavior sounds like the typical acting-up of a child in desperate need of affection. His stepmother responded with unrelenting abuse and neglect, and his father allowed her to demonize his son and never admitted his complicity in the lobotomy; Freeman capitalized on their monumental dysfunction. It's a tale of epic horror, and while Dully's courage in telling it inspires awe, listeners are left to speculate about what drove supposedly responsible adults to such unconscionable acts.

About Charles Fleming

Former Newsweek correspondent and Vanity Fair contributor Charles Fleming is coauthor of the New York Times bestsellers Three Weeks in October: The Manhunt for the Washington D.C. Serial Sniper and A Goomba's Guide to Life, and the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess and the novels The Ivory Coast and After Havana. He lives in Los Angeles.


Reviews

AudiobooksNow review by Carol on 2009-05-30 14:12:14

As a professional in the mental health field, I found this book to be both educational and disturbing. Very inspirational!

Goodreads review by johnny on March 10, 2023

the heartbreaking true story of a lobotomy, abuse, lies, and rejection. we are so very lucky that mental health treatment has changed for the better. is it perfect? no. absolutely not. but i definitely qualify a lobotomy in those archaic standards. what an evil, medieval practice.......more

Goodreads review by misha on February 29, 2008

Yet another book that makes you just want to find a kid to hug. The most heartbreaking part of his story is how no one ever spoke to him, when what he really needed was someone to step in and take him out of a really shitty family situation.......more

Goodreads review by Clare on October 22, 2007

Howard Dully' memoir recounts in great detail and candor his struggle to discover why he was lobotomized at age 12. Although I certainly felt for him and appreciated the enormity of his struggle to find truth and closure, I do wish I had come away from the book with a deeper understanding of the eff......more

Goodreads review by Jen on February 07, 2008

This was an interesting read and one that kept my attention well, but the recurrent theme in my mind while I was reading it was...someone just let this happen? It was not so much that he was given a lobotomy, or even given a lobotomy at an early age (12), but it was that so many times the people tha......more