Frank Conroy’s Foreword to “Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl” cites it as one of two books that he found most inspirational to him as a writer.

Foreword

“When I began…to write my own memoirs, there were two books whose existence heartened me—Mary McCarthy’s Memoirs…and Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, because it proved that a writer could successfully re-create states of consciousness despite his failure to understand those states when they had originally occurred…

“Renee’s courage inspired me…My own fears of reliving what had been a chaotic, frightening and confusing childhood seemed, after her example, fears I could not allow myself…

“…the book moved me because it was so clearly a triumph…of faith in the act of writing. Beset by…the impossibility of any full and direct re-creation of abnormal states of mind…she nonetheless went on to write the book, giving us the sensations of schizophrenia more vividly…than anything I’ve read…”

Frank Conroy

“Frank Conroy (1936 – 2005)…published five books, including the highly acclaimed memoir Stop-Time. Published in 1967, this…book was nominated for the National Book Award…Conroy…was director of the influential Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa for 18 years, from 1987 until 2005…” (Wikipedia).

He was an eminent person in the American literary academy.

In my first post of this blog, on Charles Dickens, in discussing Edmund Wilson’s famous essay on Dickens’s multiple personality, “Two Scrooges,” I wondered why Wilson had appreciated Dickens’s multiple personality while others had not. Had Wilson known anyone with multiple personality? I found that he had. A biography of Wilson’s wife, the novelist and critic, Mary McCarthy, told of her multiple personality since childhood.

Thus, both books cited by the longtime director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop as most inspirational to him as a writer were by people who had multiple personality: one, with misdiagnosed mental illness, was the “schizophrenic girl”; the other, with the normal version, was a novelist.