Insanely Good: 10 Books About Madness That I (A Mad Person) LOVE | A Guest Post by Sophie White
(self-titled "mad person")
As you may know, I recently had a new baby. As such, I’ve cut down slightly on my workload, thanks to some incredibly talented writers who have lent me their skills for a series of guest posts.
Today’s, by Sophie White, is a piece about her history with Bipolar disorder, a timeline of how and when the illness took hold – and what that looked like for her – and a reading list of some of the best books she’s read on the topic, some of which reflected her own experience directly.
As mentioned, Sophie is an author whose most recent release, Where I End, won the Shirley Jackson Award in 2022. If dark, creeping body horror isn’t your thing, great news: Sophie’s written an array of other books. I’d recommend starting with My Hot Friend, a book about two fine-ass feminist podcasters (no, definitely not those ones) who have a major falling out.
Sophie also presents three podcasts (she’s annoyingly hardworking), Mother of Pod, The Creep Dive, and Death is Coming, a tandem podcast with her excellent Substack, which you can subscribe to here:
TW: Discussion of mental illness and suicide.
Last week, my friend texted me about a book she had come across that she thought I would love. It was the memoir, Everything/Nothing/Someone that came out last year.
My pal was absolutely right, I practically inhaled the book which details the author, Alice Carrière’s mental illness that began in her early teens and which she spent the guts of two decades in the grip of. Carrière’s life has been one of immense privilege growing up as the only child of renowned American painter, Jennifer Bartlett – more on this below.
Part of my fevered consuming of the book was, of course, down to Carrière’s frank, raw and spare prose. She writes about the aftermath of an acute panic attack: “I awoke the next morning and fell, breathless, into a room I could barely recognise, a body I could barely feel, and a mind I could barely follow into perception.”
The most incredible aspect of Everything/Nothing/Someone for me was the similarities between my own experience of mental illness and the author’s. Here, at last, nearly 20 years after my first breakdown, I was reading someone describe the exact same untethering from reality that I went through at 22.
At the breakfast table I told my husband, Seb, about the book. Seb bore witness to that first chaotic, frightening unravelling. We’d been going out for just a year in the Autumn of 2007 when it began. He has also borne witness to every episode I’ve had since (is he, in fact, the common denominator and not the bipolar disorder that I’ve been subsequently diagnosed with!?).
“The woman in the book I’m reading had the exact same things as I had back during the first time and I mean the EXACT SAME things. The conviction that she wasn’t real, feeling like her limbs were alien. She couldn’t see her own face in the mirror because it was too terrifying. Just like me,” I said cheerily.
He seemed concerned. “Is it not difficult to read that?”
“No, not at all. I just feel this weird connection to her. This is the only time I’ve ever come across anyone describing exactly what happened to me.”
Despite my elation at finally seeing my own experience reflected back to me, when I finished the book, I was left with a residual sadness the cause of which took a couple of days to identify. I realised the book had made me sad because I didn’t have a book like this 17 years ago when I was so terrified that I had broken my brain forever. It would have reassured me so so much to know that someone else had felt this mad and sad and dislocated and had survived it.
I feel a short synopsis of my first breakdown is probably in order (if you want a longer unpacking of this breakdown and the others I’ve had since allow me to refer you to either of the non-fiction books I’ve written!)
So for ease here’s a bit of a condensed timeline:
1985 - 2006: No mental illness – yay! What a time that must’ve been (I can barely remember it tbh lol)
2003-2007: Some (what I thought was) routine recreational drug use. The “routine” bit is debatable now. As an example of stupid shit I did on drugs, I once smashed the top of a bottle of absinthe and proceeded to drink it (from what was left of the bottle) through my cardigan – using the material to “strain out” any glass. Yeah maybe not as “routine” as I’d thought.
September 1 2007: Fucks own life irrevocably.
AKA I took a pill at Electric Picnic and, as the song says, “the silicone chip inside her head gets switched to overload”. Cue night of terrifying hallucinations lying alone in a tent convinced I was going mad / going to die – something that wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility (that was the same year as the first tragic death at Electric Picnic).
September 2nd - November 17th: Goes mad.
This involves but was not limited to:
Seeing a strange face when looking at my own face in the mirror.
Hearing whispers in my ears.
Becoming convinced that reality was fake.
Having paranoid thoughts that looped endlessly in my mind.
Becoming certain that my memories were fake.
Believing that my friends and family had been replaced.
Becoming convinced that my right arm was not my own (always a hard one to explain… just try picturing looking down at your right arm and it seeming to be a stranger’s arm but then discovering that it’s attached to you… not sure if that helps lol).
Belief that I had died or had never existed taking hold.
Becoming terrified that I was going to murder someone.
Living in constant, unrelenting terror that I was going mad and had broken my brain forever. (Spoiler I kind of had… but also it’s not that simple.)
November 18th-December 7th: Starts planning own suicide all the while trying to keep up the pretense that everything is fine and refusing to see a doctor because I was too afraid of admitting that something was seriously wrong despite all of the above indicators that something was seriously wrong.
December 8th: Decides to put the killing self idea on the back burner and agree to the psychiatric intervention as a last ditch attempt to not die from this madness.
December 2007 - January 2008: Attend John Of God’s Hospital seeing a psychiatrist and a psychologist. Starts medication.
2008 - 2012: Deeply rocked by what happened to me but slowly starting to recover with help of meds, friends, family and therapy. Still having bad days and weeks when the old terrors return but getting better at coping with it all. Brain never the same again – poor old brain.
2012 - present: Honestly these 12 years are kind of like the sequel to all of the above – a very involved lengthy sequel (I wrote a whole book about it). A condensed retelling would include: more madness, postnatal depression, meds change, alcoholism, paranoid intrusive thoughts, meds change, manic episodes, hospitalisation and more meds changes. Gotta love a meds change.
As I said above, back when I was 22 and suicidal, I was extremely scared of receiving psychiatric treatment even though by December of 2007, after nearly four months, the illness had completely annihilated the person I used to be. I was utterly ground down by it all and had gotten to a place in my mind where suicide had started to look like the only way to end the pain of madness.
I so desperately wish that Alice Carrière’s book had existed back then to show me there could be a life on the other side of this madness. I wish all of the books listed below had existed. Of course, it wasn’t that no books about mental illness existed in 2007, but with social media still in the nascent stage, the accessibility to such things was so vastly different.
What pushback there was against the stigma of mental illness from writers and activists was drowned out by the the noise the media made about mad women. For example, I share a breakdown birthday with Britney Spears. 2007 was dominated by a ghoulish spectator sport called Watch Britney Unravel. It was a shit time to be a woman and it was a very shit time to be a mad woman.
Of course, the thing with mental illness is that you’re never really done with having it. I still don’t know if my illness will end in suicide. Research suggests up to 20% of people with Bipolar die by suicide so it’s an outside possibility. And once you have experienced suicidal ideation, you live with the troubling knowledge that your brain is capable of going there and you know the formidable grip of suicidal conviction – how it dissolves all reason and turns your mind against you.
Talking about suicide (and about surviving suicide attempts and suicidal ideation) more openly is one step we can take to safeguard against suicide so here I am talking about it to keep myself safe as much as to keep anyone else safe. And here listed below is a host of other people talking about it! These books, I think, capture the feeling of being mad and the challenges of trying to function in a world where your illness is often seen as either malingering, attention-seeking, trivial or something to be suspicious of.
10 Books About Madness That I (A Mad Person) LOVE:
Non-fiction
Brain On Fire: My Month Of Madness by Susan Cahalan
From the back:
Susannah Cahalan was a happy, clever, healthy twenty-four-year old. Then one day she woke up in hospital, with no memory of what had happened or how she had got there. Within weeks, she would be transformed into someone unrecognizable, descending into a state of acute psychosis, undergoing rages and convulsions, hallucinating that her father had murdered his wife; that she could control time with her mind. Everything she had taken for granted about her life, and who she was, was wiped out.
How To Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell
From the back:
By the age of 15, Cat Marnell longed to work in the glamorous world of women's magazines - but was also addicted to the ADHD meds prescribed by her father. Within 10 years she was living it up in New York as a beauty editor at Condé Nast, with a talent for 'doctor-shopping' that secured her a never-ending supply of prescribed amphetamines. Her life had become a twisted merry-go-round of parties and pills at night, while she struggled to hold down her high-profile job during the day.
Everything/Nothing/Someone by Alice Carrière
From the back:
Alice Carrière tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned artist Jennifer Bartlett and a charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carrière. Her days are a mixture of privilege, neglect, loneliness, and danger-a child living in an adult's world, with little-to-no enforcement of boundaries or supervision. Alice begins to lose her grasp on reality as a dissociative disorder erases her identity and overzealous doctors medicate her further away from herself.
How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones
From the back:
Jones tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the South as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears. Through a series of vignettes, Jones draws readers into his boyhood and adolescence – into tumultuous relationships with his family, into passing flings with lovers, friends, and strangers. Each piece builds into a larger examination of race and queerness, power and vulnerability, love and grief: a portrait of what we all do for one another – and to one another – as we fight to become ourselves.
Mad Girl by Bryony Gordon
From the back:
A hugely successful columnist for the Telegraph, a bestselling author, and a happily married mother of an adorable daughter, Bryony has managed to laugh and live well while simultaneously grappling with her illness. In Mad Girl, Bryony explores her relationship with her OCD and depression as only she can.
Fiction
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
From the back:
Everyone tells Martha Friel she is clever and beautiful, a brilliant writer who has been loved every day of her adult life by one man, her husband Patrick. A gift, her mother once said, not everybody gets. So why is everything broken? Why is Martha - on the edge of 40 - friendless, practically jobless and so often sad? And why did Patrick decide to leave? Maybe she is just too sensitive, someone who finds it harder to be alive than most people. Or maybe - as she has long believed - there is something wrong with her. Something that broke when a little bomb went off in her brain, at 17, and left her changed in a way that no doctor or therapist has ever been able to explain.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
From the Back:
The story uncompromisingly thrusts the reader into the mind of the narrator. She is a woman forced, ostensibly for her own good, into a ‘rest cure’, a psychological straitjacket so constricting that she begins to unravel. Her mental dissolution is described with such fierce immediacy that The Yellow Wallpaper has been read and anthologized as a chilling horror tale.
Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes
From the back:
Rachel Walsh has a pair of size 8 feet and such a fondness for recreational drugs that her family has forked out the cash for a spell in Cloisters - Dublin's answer to the Betty Ford Clinic. She's only agreed to her incarceration because she's heard that rehab is wall-to-wall jacuzzis, and it's about time she had a holiday.
I’m Sorry You Feel That Way by Rebecca Wait
From the back:
There is the catastrophe that is never spoken of, but which has shaped everything . . .
Sisters, Alice and Hanna must deal with disappointments in work and in love as well as increasingly complicated family tensions, and lives that look dismayingly dissimilar to what they'd intended. They must look for a way to repair their own fractured relationship, and they must finally choose their own approach to their dominant mother: submit or burn the house down. And they must decide at last whether life is really anything more than (as Hanna would have it) a tragedy with a few hilarious moments.
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
From the back:
Brown University, 1982. Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English student and incurable romantic, is writing her thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot – authors of the great marriage plots. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different men, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead, brilliant scientist and charismatic loner, attracts Madeleine with an intensity that she seems powerless to resist. Meanwhile, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus, a theology student searching for some kind of truth in life, is certain of at least one thing – that he and Madeleine are destined to be together. But as all three leave college, they will have to figure out how they want their own marriage plot to end.
Sidenote: This list is very white and that is a huge problem. Publishing has a shameful track record of marginalising voices in particular voices of women of colour. And when it comes to women of colour who suffer from mental illness two marginalised identities intersect.
Journalist Anni Ferguson wrote an excellent essay for the Guardian in 2016 about the added-layer of stigma women of colour face in receiving treatment for their mental illness, nevermind having a proper platform to unpack their experiences.
I have ordered Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s Willow Weep For Me, a memoir of the author’s personal struggle with depression. The book was well ahead of its time coming as it did in the late 90s. It details Danquah’s life as severely disadvantaged 22-year-old single mother. Shortly after her daughter’s birth, she began to suffer from a variety of depressive symptoms, which led her to believe that she was losing her mind.
Grace Cho's "Tastes Like War" has a cloud of controversy around it after her family challenged some aspects of her depiction of her mother in the book so, read at your own risk, but it is a book about mental health in a non-white cultural setting. You may find it interesting.