My Forthcoming Novel, and Why I Won't Write a Mental Illness Memoir

It's Book Week here this week!

I’m excited to say that I’ve sold a novel to Coffeehouse Press, titled The Mind Reels. It’s the story of a young woman going insane, slowly at first and then very fast. I’m really happy with how it turned out and I’m excited for it to get into the hands of readers, which should happen in Q4 2025. It’s gonna be hard to wait for people to get the chance to read it! Really really hard.

This is so exciting for me in part because it’s the result of a long period of working and tinkering and growing in a kind of writing I didn’t have much experience; I’ve been behind the woodshed, to use the guitarist term, for years. And now here we are. I’m thrilled to be publishing fiction, particularly with a cool independent press like Coffee House, and I think this story in particular is worth telling. I do have an ulterior motive that connects to nonfiction, though. For years and years I’ve been asked to write a mental illness memoir, but I’ve always resisted. Hopefully this book will scratch that itch for those who have asked.

The main reason I won’t write a memoir is because I’m opposed to glamorizing or romanticizing my illness, and the way you sell a memoir is by glamorizing and romanticizing. If I just told the truth, no one would want to read it. My mental illness and mental illness in general are boring. 99% of the time as a bipolar patient you’re either off meds but not yet pathologically manic or depressed (to the point that what’s happening is interesting), on meds and chugging along with the side effects, or in the extremely staid and slow-moving confines of a mental institution. The manic periods are often short, thanks to the tendency of those with mania to wind up on a ward or in a cell. Depression is hard to make interesting in prose, certainly for more than a chapter or two. So I genuinely don’t know how I would fill the pages of a mental illness memoir. I just haven’t had enough dramatic stuff happen to me related to my illness; I never played basketball with Big Chief. Bad stuff has happened. Extreme stuff has happened. But it’s grubby and pathetic stuff, not engrossing. I’m really dedicated to making sure people know that being bipolar isn’t romantic or exciting but rather a grinding, enervating, tedious slog, a boring march, hopefully towards healing.

If I wrote a mental illness memoir that was true, it wouldn’t be interesting, and if it was interesting, it wouldn’t be true. I could write it in such a way that every word was factually correct, but it would still feel fundamentally false by nature of the fact that I was holding it out and saying, “look, look at this interesting thing!”

The other major problem: I don’t remember key experiences. Not well enough to write down in black and white. Some of these memories are more than 20 years old; I was manic, and sometimes actively psychotic, when important parts happened; at other times I was on powerful antipsychotic medications that cause major memory issues; I was in active denial of my illness for a good twelve or so years. None of that is conducive to remembering key details of my story. A good example is the legal status of my first hospitalization - I understood on entry that I was not allowed to leave, then later on they started saying stuff like “of course, you’re free to go when you would like, but we think you should stay,” and then they were recommending me for discharge. I don’t recall a hearing of any kind or any formal acknowledgment that my status had changed when it did. I don’t know if I never knew those details at one point or not, if I lost them over time or if the weight of years, psychosis, drugs, booze, and medication has simply erased the answers from my brain. And honestly… I had a long period of introspection and exploring my own history years back; after everything that happened in 2017 I went out hunting for information about my own story, after so many years of trying to avoid it all. And to be honest with you, I’m deeply ambivalent about that process. Moving forward has done a lot more for me than looking back. A memoir would thrust me back into years I have absolutely no desire to relive.

In general, my time in the mental health system has been marked by constant confusion. I would feel like I liar if I said, “and then this month, this happened.” The best I can do in nonfiction is what I’ve done at times here - tell you the parts I know, tell you what they have meant to me, and say what I think it means for the culture. And if I’m making an argument, I’ll just do that - write about mental illness from arm’s length, of course informed by my own experiences but not about them. Meanwhile, with this novel I have tried to capture some of the essence of what it feels like when you lose your mind, while taking advantages of the affordances of fiction to make it into a story you’d want to read. That’s the idea, anyway.

I’ve read dozens of mental illness memoirs, which are something of a minor obsession of mine. A few are really good. Some are thinly-disguised self-help tracts. Many are guilty of romanticizing that which should not be romanticized; almost all of them leave me feeling profoundly skeptical at times, either that events happened as written or that the author could possibly remember some of the reported details. And some are cynical cash-ins! Me, I’m not important and my life hasn’t been that interesting. So fiction will have to do what I’ve been asked many times to do in memoir. I’m really proud of this project and I hope many of you will read it when you can. I consider it a summation, of sorts, of my personal observations of life with mental illness, bringing an end to my various confessions. It’s also, I hope, a good story in the way my real life could never be. And now we wait. You all will be the first to know when preorders are up.