He Wanted the Moon by Mimi Baird with Eve Claxton

A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015

“Extraordinary… utterly impossible to put down.”
— The New York Times

“One of the great father-daughter books of our time.”
—Pat Conroy

“Fascinating…cinematic…poignant…”
—The Washington Post

He Wanted the Moon by Mimi Baird with Eve Claxton

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Brad Pitt to adapt He Wanted the Moon: “[The] heartbreaking, enthralling story, compiled by Mimi from her memories… has been optioned for the big screen by Brad Pitt. Pitt said, ‘It’s a gorgeous story, and especially about mental illness.'”

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**A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015**: “In 1944, Mimi Baird’s father disappeared from her life. Decades later, she recovered a manuscript her father had written that explains his absence: he had been institutionalized for mental illness. An edited version of that document is the centerpiece of this fascinating memoir, which combines the elder Baird’s narrative — a cinematic tale featuring Ratched-like nurses and an escape scene straight out of ‘The Fugitive’ — and his daughter’s poignant discovery of a lost parent.”

—Nora Krug, The Washington Post

Baird’s lonely, angry, grief‐stricken, and occasionally grandiose account of his illness and its shattering costs is the reason we can’t put [this book] down. His sharply detailed recollections are sometimes sane and sometimes not, but his writing is lucid even when his thinking isn’t. His manuscript is a plea to understand his experience and, by extension, others’.

—The Boston Globe

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Photo of Mimi Baird as a child dressed as a cowgirl

It was the spring of 1994 when I returned from work to find the package containing my father’s manuscript on my doorstep. I was fifty-six years old and I’d been waiting for some word of him for most of my life.

I was a six year-old child when he stopped coming home. My mother refused to say where he had gone, except to tell me that he was “ill” and “away.” That same year of 1944, she filed for a divorce and quickly remarried, closing the chapter of her life that included my father. I was never taken to visit him growing up; his name was rarely mentioned in our house. Since childhood, I had been informed in fleeting comments that he suffered from manic depression. I had seen him again only once, very briefly, before his death in 1959.

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A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015

Brad Pitt to adapt He Wanted the Moon: “[The] heartbreaking, enthralling story, compiled by Mimi from her memories… has been optioned for the big screen by Brad Pitt. Pitt said, ‘It’s a gorgeous story, and especially about mental illness.'”

Buy the Book