A multi-faceted and extraordinarily honest look at the devastating toll that schizophrenia takes on its victims and on those who care about them, Mary Loudon’s Relative Stranger is riveting, illuminating, and heart-wrenching. It is the author’s fascinating quest to find her sister Catherine, who was lost to her family long before she died, in Catherine’s home, in her last hospital room, her paintings, her letters, her clothes. But perhaps even more compelling is Mary Loudon’s internal journey. In facing the truths about Catherine’s life and death, she asks hard questions about sanity, about family responsibility, about love, and about what it means to say that a life is – or is not – worth living. With intelligence, compassion, and a sharp eye for the funny as well as the sad, Mary Loudon ensures that we question everything we thought we knew about what it means to love, to lose, to live and die, and, most of all, to belong.