I stopped Marya after she signed books to get her top advice for staying well with mental illness. Evident that she’s winding herself up to head on the road–never a good lifestyle for a bp–her responses were brief, though most would agree they’re accurate.
1. take your meds
2. sleep
3. stay off the sauce
4. find exceptional professionals
5. get rid of poor support
6. laugh
7. believe it is not the end of your life
It is true that the “fall from grace” memoir is a crowded market. But as more Americans become aware of bipolar disorder–or realize they they know someone with the illness or have it themselves–another sub-genre has sprung up: the bipolar memoir.
It’s truly a phenomenon. There’s of course the bible of the genre, “An Unquiet Mind” by Kaye Redfield Jamison. Then there are the “Look at me I’m bipolar! Mania is so much fun!” A few that come to mind, Andy Behrman’s “Electroboy,” and Lizzie Simon “Detour: My Bipolar World in 4-D.”
Some that turn on the glamour, like the recently published Manic: A Memoir by Terri Cheney.
And there are endless, countless self-published books, with prose purpler than the next.
So do we really need another bipolar memoir?
Marya’s publicist, Alia Hanna-Habib from Hougton Mifflin, waited while Marya signed some books, and so I asked her what sets the book apart.
“The quality of the writing,” she said. “Marya’s style is both lyrical and funny. She has this way of looking at herself that’s irreverent and self-deprecating. “
Aliya has been furiously booking her seven-city tour which has just started, and reaching out to NAMI chapters in these markets. She just learned this morning, that when Marya is in Portland, she will speak to their NAMI chapter.
Someone asked a question about the humor in a memoir. Is it odd that humor infiltrates a memoir about mental illness?
Hornbacher on the humor of mental illness:
“As I’m ramping up into mania I am aware of how batty I’m getting. You become your moods and thoughts. There’s no ability to step back from the immediacy,” so things appear to be funny.
“The reality is that mental illness is not always like that,” she says after reading a dramatic scene about gallivanting with a fellow mentally-ill friend.
“I’ve ridden these moods since I was a child.”
Hornbacher, author of the new memoir “Madness: A Bipolar Life,” and of the Pulitzer-nominated “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia” has suffered from bipolar disorder her whole life. Her book opens up with her entrenched in a manic episode, engaged in self-cutting. She read from that scene to start her first reading of the tour, and though it resembles the first scene of many of the “fall from grace” memoirs I’ve read, the writing is much more gripping and dramatic. Hornbacher’s new memoir is as much about the writing as it is about recalling her experience–and that, as someone who is a book publishing veteran and read the entire canon, this will get the book, and her, very far.
