I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

The multimillion-copy bestselling modern classic of autobiographical fiction about a young woman’s struggle with mental health, featuring a new foreword by Esme Weijun Wang, the New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias, and a new afterword by the author

A Penguin Classic

After making an attempt on her own life, sixteen-year-old Deborah Blau is diagnosed with schizophrenia. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a psychiatric hospital many hours from her home in suburban Chicago. Here she will spend the next three years, trying, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, to find a path back to her normal life, and to emerge from the imaginary Kingdom of Yr in which she has sought refuge.

A semiautobiographical novel originally published under the pen name Hannah Green just a year after Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar–a very different portrait of psychological breakdown–I Never Promised You a Rose Garden remains, more than half a century later, a timeless and ultimately hopeful book, ripe for rediscovery by a new generation eager to erase the stigma of mental illness.