My New Novel, The Mind Reels

my last appeal

The subscriber writing roundup will be published tomorrow afternoon.

My third (published) book and first (published) novel, The Mind Reels, comes out one week from today, 10/7/2025, from Coffee House Press. While I’m sure I’ll include links to buy it until the end of days, this is the last time I’m going to appeal to you directly to order it. I’m proud of the book. It deserves an audience, but such things are outside of my control and, if we’re being honest, determined long before books are written. What I hope, and have reason to believe, is that it will gradually find its way into the hands of people who share my psychiatric disorder and maybe make them feel a little less alone. Of course, writing careers require bigger audiences than just those of unsound mind, so I’m asking the able-bodied and brained among you to buy it too. You can find a variety of places to buy it, including in audiobooks and ebook forms, here. And the odds are strong that your local bookstore will carry it too.

The Mind Reels tells the story of Alice, a young woman entering college and negotiating the slow implosion of her life as bipolar disorder pushes and pulls her through paranoia, mania, and the long gray corridors of depression. It’s not a romantic story; it’s not an adventure dressed up in the clothing of illness. It’s an attempt to say plainly (and yet, paradoxically, with whatever art I can muster) what it actually feels like when the mind stops belonging to you, when you become a passenger in your own existence, piloted around by your limbic system like an RC car. The book has characters and plot and momentum, yes, but at its heart it’s a testimony - my testimony - to the real shape of living with a disorder that never leaves, that consumes years, friendships, futures. The book, I think, is entertaining and more kinetic and faster than you’d ever imagine from my descriptions of it; I wrote it to be enjoyed. But it is also, I hope, an honest portrayal of an awful condition that everyone knows and very few understand.

I wrote this book because almost nothing I have ever read about bipolar disorder has seemed true to me. Too often, literature and pop culture take mental illness and turn it into spectacle, or worse, into something glamorous. What I wanted was honesty, and honesty meant ugliness. I wanted to record what the days are like - the grinding blackness of depression, the tedium of endlessly repeating thoughts, the gnawing paranoia that never relents, the strange behavior that corrodes trust, the shame of recovery, the dull blank days of treatment. I wanted to write about what it means to lose friends and then lose more of them, to look back and count the cost in burned bridges and vanished years. Above all, I wanted to try to give shape to that most inescapable of companions, regret. Regret so heavy that you can’t lift it, regret the becomes the texture of life itself. And while I never would have admitted to it at the time, I wrote the book in the hopes that the regret I wrote into it would stay within its covers, get spread out among its pages, and live forever in the world of fiction, of make believe. I guess I thought that I could set the weight down. That has not come to pass, and regret still rides along with me quietly like a dirty coin in my pocket. But I’m still glad that I wrote it down. I have never had any other control over my life, but in words.

I am in a strange period of my life. My wife and I have never been closer; my son, so quickly, has become the companion I could never part with, my sweet little friend. I love my life. And, also, I am professionally and creatively bereft. Because of the generosity of all of you, I’m still making my living on this newsletter, and I still lie awake at night worrying about earning your money. But in the broader sense, I know that my career as the kind of writer I’ve been is over. There’s nowhere left for me to go in this business. You know what I think about why, but it doesn’t matter why - whoever held the brush, I have been painted into a corner in the world of writing argumentative shortform nonfiction for money. I hold out hopes that I can just write books, but the business isn’t in great shape, and increasingly my agent doesn’t see much commercial in the things I want to do, and he is wise in those ways. But I will go on trying. The question, of course, is whether my old profession will ever allow me to fully enter into the new. Hope does spring eternal. It helps that I love writing. I’ll keep doing it, somewhere.

The Mind Reels is a good novel, one that was always due to face a difficult reception thanks to who I am, but one that (I think) has virtues enough to live past the momentary attention cycle and become a book, actually, a book itself, not its author’s reputation but a book, paperbound. And if someone finds it randomly in the bargain bin at the Strand in twenty years, gives it a shot on a whim, and finds something to love in it, that will be enough. I hope you’ll buy it, not for me but because it sounds like something you want to read. I’m not much of an artist, but perhaps it doesn’t take an artist to make suffering visible to others. This is as corny and cliché and emo a thing as I will ever write, but oh well: this book is my suffering. I give it to you.