He Wanted the Moon is an extremely disturbing and uncomfortable book to read; not only because it bares open some of the craziest extremes of the cruelty that humans can possess, but also because everything that's been written are true events. It's not just a modern day horror story that a brilliant story-teller conjured up out of nowhere except from her vivid imagination; everything written in here, every little gory detail, had been real, the people in it had been real. And perhaps knowing that made it so difficult to get through this book, but it was also that, that kept me reading. I couldn't put this book down; the idea of it almost felt like a disservice to the voice speaking to me, to the readers. I finished reading it in one night and its impact on me was hard. I even had trouble falling asleep afterwards. I cannot even imagine what it must have been like for Mimi Baird to actually write this book about her father.
He Wanted the Moon is partly an autobiography of a brilliant doctor and scientist, Dr. Perry Baird, who wrote the manuscript of his book while suffering from manic depression, also known as bipolar disorder. The last half of the book is written by Mimi Baird, Dr. Baird's daughter, after she had found this manuscript, decades after the death of her estranged father. She had no clue what he went through all those years ago when the only explanation of her father's absence from her life had been that he was "away". After coming into possession of this manuscript, she embarked on a quest to find out more about her father, his life, his illness, and his death.
