The Truth About Going Mad in America

In 1973, when Jonathan Rosen was ten years old, his family moved to New Rochelle, New York. The son of intellectuals–a novelist mother whose best friend was Cynthia Ozick, and a professor father who escaped the Holocaust on the Kindertransport as a child–Jonathan was raised with Jewish ideals valuing intellectual excellence.

Named after his grandfather, who was murdered in the Holocaust, Rosen wore an anxious sadness, but was sustained by the belief that he could do great things.

Down the street lived another 10-year-old boy from a family of Jewish intellectuals named Michael Laudor. Charismatic and funny, Laudor devoured multiple books a week, which he retained with his photographic memory. He dazzled adults and peers alike with his effortless aptitude and preternatural confidence—by all accounts, he was a genius.

Rosen and Laudor's symbiotic intellectual curiosity sparked an intense friendship. Their conversations were fueled by big ideas and grand visions, bonding them instantly, setting them on parallel paths which found them at the same sleepaway camp, the same prestigious summer program, sharing dreams of becoming writers, and vying for the same positions and accolades, easily meeting the expectations for greatness they’d grown up with, until their lives suddenly and dramatically diverged in ways no one saw coming.  

Both were accepted into the Telluride Association Summer Seminar in high school, an immersive educational experience held at Cornell University for exceptional students, and then to Yale, marking their inevitable entrance into the world of the white, male American meritocratic elite. 

However, while the anxious Rosen often walked in the shadow of Laudor's genius, he ultimately escaped the tragic consequences of being struck down by mental illness, a crisis that claimed Laudor in his 20s, violently derailing his trajectory and ending the life of his pregnant fiancée, Caroline “Carrie” Costello.

In his memoir The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, one of the New York Times’ 10 best books of 2023 (and a Pulitzer Prize finalist!) Rosen writes about this friendship, his younger anxious self who envied his friend’s genius, and the divergent trajectory of their lives as Laudor was ravaged by psychosis due to Shizoaffective disorder—a mental health disorder marked by hallucinations, delusions, depression and mania, which ultimately claimed three promising lives.

Here’s the story of Michael Laudor, Carrie Costello, and the perils of going mad in America…

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