Madness by Marya Hornbacher

What an important book.

Hornbacher has lived with rapid-cycle bipolar her whole life (she is in her thirties now) and has the talent and foresight to write about her swings from manic to depressed both while she is in her mania (seventy pages in one day!) and when she is healthy. When she is depressed, she can do very little besides sleep and stare. Her writing has saved her and will be of use to many who will identify with her experiences.

Hornbacher is lucky to come from a endlessly supportive family and to have an extremely patient and understanding husband. After one particularly bad trip to the ER where she fought being admitted and was just "plausibly sane" enough to talk her way out of it, they are in the car going home and she apologizes to him, "I'm really sorry about that." "You're damn right," he says. I love the friendship between them, the way they work together with her illness. Here's an interchange with Marya, her husband, and her psychiatrist:


[The doctor] looks down at his little notepad and says,"Looks like you're feeling a little speedy."

"A little. Only a very little. A very little bit," I say, holding my fingers about an inch apart. "But I have to get my things done. I can't stop now. I'm on a roll."

He nods and says to Jeff, "How would you say she's doing?"

"She's bats," Jeff says.

This bothers me not at all. I have learned to take Jeff with me to the doctor when I am feeling off, since I have no perspective. He sits across from me on the little couch. He's watching me, looking worried. This irritates me gravely. I sigh at him and become more fully involved in the incredible speed of my foot.


She did not always have such a true partner and spent years complicating her illness with anorexia, bulimia, and practically selling her body for alcohol. She's not a poster child for the disorder, saying, "Now I'm free! You, too, can shake this illness!" But she is a very real person who has suffered a lot and has learned by absolute necessity how to simplify her life and do some very regulated things to make her periods of health longer and her episodes more manageable.

I'm glad this book exists.