the humor of mania

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.”

Marya Hornbacher reads on the first night of her tour

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.