Love and Family Theme Analysis

Because Susannah doesn't remember her time in the hospital and therefore relies heavily on interviews with her friends and family to write her memoir, the book naturally focuses intensely on the roles Susannah's parents, friends, and extended family members played in her diagnosis and recovery. She positions the love and care her parents showed her as being the sole reason she even survived her illness. Though Stephen and Susannah's parents support her because they absolutely and unconditionally love her, her psychotic symptoms don't always make loving her easy—and in the case of her dad, during her illness Susannah firmly expresses a desire to not see him at all or receive any kind of support from him. With this, Brain on Fire explores how love functions in families during terrifying circumstances, especially when showing love to someone else means going against their wishes or doing things for their own good.

When Susannah introduces her parents, it's evident that her relationships with both her mom and dad are strong and caring, though she admits that before she became ill she was much closer to her mom than her dad. Her romantic relationship with Stephen, though only months old, is described as similarly loving and positive. However, all three relationships are tested when Susannah begins experiencing psychotic symptoms that make her cruel and paranoid. She accuses her mom of hiring paid actors to humiliate her and “teach her a lesson,” decides she needs to break up with Stephen, and hallucinates that Dad murdered his wife, Giselle. The night of that hallucination Susannah also admits that she said terrible things to her father that made him cry, though she doesn't remember doing so and he refuses to share what she said. All of Susannah's delusions, hallucinations, and paranoia about her family make her exceptionally difficult to be around and care for, even though care is exactly what she needs. Fortunately for Susannah, her family's love for her and their tenacity in pursuing care despite her insistence on returning alone to her apartment is what saves her from life in a mental institution or an early death, consequences she may have suffered had her family taken her at her word.

Despite the fact that Susannah believes her dad to be a violent murderer, he persists in caring for Susannah in a way that doesn't trigger outbursts but still helps her. When the nursing staff implies that Susannah's escape attempts will force them to move her to a psychiatric ward, he decides to spend his days waiting outside her room at the hospital. He notices that when someone is there, even if Susannah doesn't want him there, the nurses take better care of her. Similarly, during her recovery, Susannah also describes how she resented the fact that her mom had to dole out Susannah's complicated medications six times per day. Though this is a job that her mother takes on out of love for her daughter as much as out of necessity, Susannah resents the fact that her mom must treat her like a child and hound her to take her very necessary medications. Susannah also admits that she (wrongfully) resented her mother for not spending more time with her in the hospital, and this resentment coupled with her frustration at being treated like a child causes Susannah to be purposefully cruel and distant to her mother. Though Susannah understands that she needs her mom's love and help to live (and in her narration recognizes that her dad's vigil outside her hospital room saved her from a psychiatric ward), she desperately longs to be independent and actively resists her mom's love and care in retaliation.

When Mom and Dad persist in caring for Susannah in spite of her rejection and cruelty, the very existence of the memoir itself stands as an example of the positive outcomes that can arise out of this kind of enduring care. Though Susannah takes great pains to credit the skilled doctors at NYU, she reminds the reader again and again that she never would've gotten there without her parents to advocate for her when she couldn't. In this way, the book insists that showing love to others in the form of advocating for their health and care is one of the most important things a person can do, and can absolutely save lives.