Natasha Williams – A Reading and Conversation

Author Natasha Williams speaks at West Falmouth Library on Sunday, May 24 3-5 p.m. She will perform a reading from her acclaimed memoir The Parts of Him I Kept, followed by a talk moderated by Molly Akin. Book signing and sale in partnership with Eight Cousins to follow. Free and open to all. Co-presented with NAMI Cape Cod & The Islands.

The Parts of Him I Kept is an intimate account of a daughter’s coming of age in the face of her father’s schizophrenic unraveling. Williams investigates the limits of our medical and cultural understanding of schizophrenia while chronicling the shared burden and benefits of caring for a mentally ill family member. In the tradition of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We are Briefly Gorgeous, Michael Greenberg’s Hurry Down Sunshine and Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, The Parts of Him I Kept asks us to consider the ways mental illness is as much a social issue as a biological condition.

Winner of the 2026 PenCraft Book Award for Nonfiction Memoir, The Parts of Him I Kept has been praised as a Kirkus Editors’ Pick: “The work offers a welcome wealth of insights into the challenges of living with mental illness. An engrossing debut memoir.”

Natasha Williams has a MA from University of Pennsylvania and in the summer of 2020, she accepted a spot with the Bread Loaf School of English and attended the Bread Loaf Writers Conference 2023.