He Wanted The Moon
THE MADNESS AND MEDICAL GENIUS OF DR. PERRY BAIRD
AND HIS DAUGHTER’S QUEST TO KNOW HIM (CROWN, 2015)
BY MIMI BAIRD WITH EVE CLAXTON (CROWN, 2015)
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction book of 2015.
Optioned for a film by Brad Pitt’s Plan B, with
an adapted screenplay by Tony Kushner.
“An extraordinary Möbius strip of a book…Autobiography, biography, science, history and literature all in one, as instructive as any textbook and utterly impossible to put down…The text of Dr. Baird’s manuscript is haunting. The tone is one a suspense writer might struggle to sustain.”
—The New York Times
“Extraordinary…a remarkably eloquent account of mental illness, reminiscent of Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind and Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted…The elder Baird’s narrative is cinematic, featuring Ratched-like nurses and an escape scene straight out of The Fugitive… [Dr. Baird] never really knew his daughter — or her achievement in telling this story.” —The Washington Post
“One of the great father-daughter books of our time.”
—Pat Conroy