Why the title, “Rambler: A family pushes through…”?

What should I call my book after spending so many years writing it? It was a weighty question that took months to answer.

Initially, I titled it Gray Matters because I write a lot about the uncertainty I felt living with my husband’s mental illness. When Steve first began having problems in the early 1990s, there were no biological markers—like an elevated white blood cell count or a lump on the breast—to point to. (Researchers are making progress, but there is still very little physical evidence for mental illnesses.) Instead, psychiatrists assess symptoms, like unusual changes in a person’s behavior and thinking, to determine a diagnosis. Naturally, this left me confused as I tried understanding the shifts I saw in Steve’ personality.

But Gray Matters also seemed vague; it didn’t really say what the book was about. When one of my readers suggested Rambler, I liked it. Looking back, Rambler seems inevitable; unknowingly I’d used the word 70-plus times in writing the book. Throughout the acute stage of his illness, Steve was obsessed with collecting these cheap, conservative cars.

Settling on Rambler for a title, I thought about a subtitle. More rumination. I knew I wanted the word “family” to be part of it because my story isn’t just about a husband and wife working their way through a difficult medical diagnosis. It’s also about protecting our family life amid the frequent chaos caused by Steve’s illness. Our three children ranged in age from five to fifteen when Steve was hospitalized following a major psychotic episode in 1995.

Eventually the word “gray”—which I was reluctant to let go of—morphed into “fog,” but I still needed a verb: Navigate? Find? Travel? Push? I considered them all.

Navigate was too nautical; find, too passive; and travel sounded euphemistic, like we were on an adventure. When I came to “push,” though, I paused. I liked it because it suggested action. Recovering from a severe mental illness doesn’t just happen; it requires the concerted effort of many. Not just Steve and me, but family and friends as well as the medical community. It also involves “tapping into the strength and determination of those who came before me,” as I write in Rambler. 

Although my father died a decade before the onset of Steve’s illness, my mother was there in whatever way she could, despite living three hundred miles from us. It wasn’t their day-to-day support that I turned to, but the way they lived their lives, for by their example, “they endowed me with the potential to push through and persevere, and for that I am grateful.”

Thus, after much deliberation and consultation, the full title of my book became Rambler: A family pushes through the fog of mental illness.