I learned that Rob Reiner and his wife Michele had been murdered when a journalist friend texted me the tragic news, adding that the Reiners’ son Nick was the prime suspect. Though I grew up in New Rochelle, New York, where Rob Reiner spent his childhood, I did not have a personal connection to the victims; it only felt that way. Like millions of Americans who grew up in the ’70s watching All in the Family, I have a place in my brain where Meathead, the character Reiner played, is on permanent display, like Archie Bunker’s chair in the Smithsonian.
Our shared imaginary world is not the only reason my friend texted me; it was because of a book I’d written, The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions, which is about my childhood best friend, Michael Laudor, who grew up across the street from me in New Rochelle, went to Yale the same year I did, but suffered a psychotic break a few years after graduating.
Brilliant and charming, Michael managed to go to Yale Law School despite a diagnosis of schizophrenia and an ongoing battle with delusions he sometimes recounted to his professors. After a profile in The New York Times showcased his battle with mental illness—it ended with the dean of Yale Law School calling Michael “a brilliant young person who has conquered what is always difficult—an illness—but has conquered it extraordinarily well,” he sold his life story to Ron Howard, who, like Rob Reiner, had been a beloved TV star before becoming a director. Brad Pitt was cast to play Michael, and I allowed myself to think that Hollywood had saved him. But he had stopped taking his medication, spiraled into psychosis, and stabbed his pregnant fiancée to death in a psychotic rage.
