Madness: A Bipolar Life by Marya Hornbacher

From the Publisher

From the author of the best-selling Wasted, an astonishing dispatch from inside the belly of bipolar disease, reflecting major new insights

When Marya Hornbacher published her first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she did not yet know the reason for her all-but-shattered young life. At age twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type 1 rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disease there is.

In Madness, in her trademark wry and utterly self-revealing voice, Hornbacher tells her new story. Through scenes of astonishing visceral and emotional power, she takes us inside her own desperate attempts to control violently careening mood swings by self-starvation, substance abuse, numbing sex, and self-mutilation. How Hornbacher fights her way up from a madness that all but destroys her, and what it is like to live in a difficult and sometimes beautiful life and marriage—where bipolar always beckons—is at the heart of this brave and heart-stopping memoir.

Madness delivers the revelation that Hornbacher is not alone: there are millions of people in America struggling with a variety of disorders that may mask their true diagnosis of bipolar. Also, Hornbacher's fiercely self-aware portrait of her own bipolar as early as age four will powerfully change the current debate on whether bipolar in children exists.

Ten years after Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, this storm of a memoir will provoke, educate, and move.

Publishers Weekly

Hornbacher, who detailed her struggle with bulimia and anorexia in Wasted, now shares the story of her lifelong battle with mental illness, finally diagnosed as rapid cycling type 1 bipolar disorder. Even as a toddler, Hornbacher couldn't sleep at night and jabbered endlessly, trying to talk her parents into going outside to play in the dark. Other schoolchildren called her crazy. When she was just 10, she discovered alcohol was a good "mood stabilizer"; by age 14, she was trading sex for pills. In her late teens, her eating disorder landed her in the hospital, followed by another body obsession, cutting. An alcoholic by this point, she was alternating between mania and depression, with frequent hospitalizations. Her doctor explained that not only did the alcohol block her medications, it was up to her to control her mental illness, which would always be with her. This truth didn't sink in for a long, long time, but when it did, she had a chance for a life outside her local hospital's psychiatric unit. Hornbacher ends on a cautiously optimistic note-she knows she'll never lead a "normal life," but maybe she could live with the life she does have. Although painfully self-absorbed, Hornbacher will touch a nerve with readers struggling to cope with mental illness. (Apr.)

Elizabeth Brinkley - Library Journal

In Hornbacher's first book, Wasted, she described the agony of life with eating disorders. What she did not know then was why she so abused her body. That answer came at age 24, when she was diagnosed with an extreme form of bipolar disorder. This memoir recounts episodes of that disease, and it is heartbreaking. Readers sense Hornbacher's struggle to rein in the paragraphs, sentences, words that sprawl across the page; many sections have little punctuation and lead nowhere. Alternately, the scenes over which Hornbacher exerts some control seem to come from a place of thoughtful repose and are both disturbing and deeply moving, giving true insight into what it's like to live with this most stubbornly intransigent of mental disorders. That the book was finished at all is a great tribute to Hornbacher's resilience. Followers of Wasted and other literary recovery memoirs will clamor for this. [See Prepub Alert, LJ12/07.]

Kirkus Reviews

Photoshop of horrors from a writer who has suffered countless maladies during her long battle with mental illness. Hornbacher begins when she is 20 and in one of her self-mutilation phases. Then she looks back, using relentlessly present-tense verbs to provide snapshots of prior disturbing moments, beginning with her frenzies and terrors at age four, advancing through elementary school ("I am shitfaced and hyper and ten years old"), then on to cocaine and eating disorders. Psychiatrists and hospitals don't help much; mental-health professionals are always far less clever than the author. In 1996, while working on her first book (Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, 1998), she's told that she has severe bipolar disorder. Disdaining the meds, mistaking her highs for cures, she ignores the diagnosis. Hornbacher's prose accelerates when she's writing about her manic periods, then slows for the depressive lulls. Later, she organizes the text in short sections labeled by year, or season, or month, or sometimes even by hour. They chronicle drinking, random sex, cutting, vomiting, anonymous boyfriends, good and bad husbands, multiple hospitalizations, alternating periods of zany mania and I'm-not-leaving-my-bed depression, multiple meds, clueless shrinks, shock therapy, cocktails of drugs. Somehow Hornbacher goes on a book tour, writes a novel (The Center of Winter, 2005), remembers pages of detailed conversations. People are always telling her that she's hot and talented. A couple of times she says that madness and electroshock have wiped clean her memory, then she launches into more pages of verbatim witty dialogue and detailed description from days or decades ago. She ends with anepilogue chockablock with cliches like "but there is hope too" and "I am who I am."Blurs the line between imagination and memory so thoroughly that truth struggles for visibility. Agent: Sydelle Kramer/Susan Rabiner Literary Agency

Product Details

• ISBN: 0618754458
  
• ISBN-13: 9780618754458
• Format: Hardcover, 320pp
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company
• Pub. Date: April 2008
• Sales Rank: 5,366