A searing unflinching & deeply moving account of Marya Hornbacher's personal experience of living with bipolar disorder. From the age of six Marya Hornbacher knew that something was terribly wrong with her manifesting itself in anorexia & bulimia which she documented in her bestselling memoir ' Wasted'. But it was only eighteen years later that she learned the true underlying reason for her distress: bipolar disorder. In this new equally raw & frank account Marya Hornbacher tells the story of her ongoing battle with this most pervasive & devastating of mental illnesses; how as she puts it 'it crept over me like a vine sending out tentative shoots in my childhood taking deeper root in my adolescence growing stronger in my early adulthood eventually covering my body & face until I was unrecognizable trapped immobilized'. She recounts the soaring highs & obliterating lows of her condition; the savage moodswings & impossible strains it placed on her relationships; the physical danger it has occasionally put her in; the endless cycle of illness & recovery. She also tackles the paradoxical aspects of bipolar disorder
- how it has been the drive behind some of her most creative work
- & the reality of a life lived in limbo 'caught between the world of the mad & the world of the sane'. Yet for all the torment it documents this is a book about survival about living day to day with bipolar disorder
- the constant round of therapy & medication
- & managing it. As well as her own highly personal story the book
Includes:: interviews with family spouses & friends of sufferers the people who help their loved ones carry on. Visceral & inspiring lyrical & sometimes even funny ' Madness' will take its place alongside other classics of the genre such as ' An Unquiet Mind' & ' Girl Interrupted'.