“Research, imagination, and his talent as a writer of vibrant nonfiction are the tools of resurrection that Stephen Trimble uses to bring his older brother back to life in The Mike File. Many of us, as individuals, as families, and as a country, shy away from looking directly at the painful lives of the mentally ill. ‘No one gave Mike a second thought,’ Trimble writes of his brother, who has fallen through the cracks of the mental health system. The Mike File is Stephen Trimble’s second thought. In it he faces himself, his family and the cracked world of our schools and institutions, and through a great act of empathy brings back the life of a brother who was lost.”

―David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

“The Mike File speaks to the still silent voice that travels through all families beset with mental illness. In a voice at once stark and vulnerable, blind and yet beset with loss, Steve Trimble searches through the scattered history of his older brother’s life in an attempt to understand the incomprehensible―the loss of a brother institutionalized for schizophrenia. In his pursuit to understand his brother’s life and indeed his own, Trimble forces us to acknowledge the painful truths about how we treat those with mental illness. This book is a beautiful and anguished revelation.”

―Melissa Bond, author of Blood Orange Night

“This is a story about one family. But more, it’s an American story, where mental illness hides in the shadows. I will never forget Mike, and the years he spent as a boy in an asylum. I will never forget Mike’s mother’s terrible jolt of discovery when Mike died. And I’ll surely never forget the profound journey that writer Steve Trimble undertook as he faced the contents of the Mike File, the history of his brother’s short life.”

―Dorothee Kocks, author of The Glass Harmonica and Dream a Little