Easy to Slip

Sam Kovner reads messages on walls and hears voices in the hall, and wonders: if you find yourself losing your mind, how do you get well?

Winter, 1976, Columbia University. Hearing voices and seeing hateful writing on walls, early admission Sam Kovner walks the New York streets, sleepless thirty-six hours. Through the radiant specificity of memory, he reckons with a hard-driving father, a caring, sometimes careless mother, a generous, self-involved uncle who’s just become a movie star, and star-struck grandparents. Sam fears the undertow of feelings: he’s not quite spent the night with someone he’s fallen for. Home for high-school graduation, a prom night affair reminds Sam of how he once knew love, freeing him to face his encroaching psychosis. Entering a hospital, he confronts traumatic, repressed memories with unflinching courage. With irrepressible humor and pathos, Easy to Slip recalls an era when youth mattered and people healed from psychiatric illness.