Book Club: Manic

Recently, I joined a book club.  There is an interesting story behind my look for a local book club in the uppity suburbs at a later date.  At our very first meeting, we chose to read the book Manic: A Memoir.  The synopsis from the inside flap read:

"I didn't tell anyone that I was going to Santa Fe to kill myself."

On the outside, Terri Cheney was a highly successful, attractive Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer. But behind her seemingly flawless façade lay a dangerous secret—for the better part of her life Cheney had been battling debilitating bipolar disorder and concealing a pharmacy's worth of prescriptions meant to stabilize her moods and make her "normal."

In bursts of prose that mirror the devastating highs and extreme lows of her illness, Cheney describes her roller-coaster life with shocking honesty—from glamorous parties to a night in jail; from flying fourteen kites off the edge of a cliff in a thunderstorm to crying beneath her office desk; from electroshock therapy to a suicide attempt fueled by tequila and prescription painkillers.

With Manic, Cheney gives voice to the unarticulated madness she endured. The clinical terms used to describe her illness were so inadequate that she chose to focus instead on her own experience, in her words, "on what bipolar disorder felt like inside my own body." Here the events unfold episodically, from mood to mood, the way she lived and remembers life. In this way the reader is able to viscerally experience the incredible speeding highs of mania and the crushing blows of depression, just as Cheney did. Manic does not simply explain bipolar disorder—it takes us in its grasp and does not let go.

In the tradition of Darkness Visible and An Unquiet Mind, Manic is Girl, Interrupted with the girl all grown up. This harrowing yet hopeful book is more than just a searing insider's account of what it's really like to live with bipolar disorder. It is a testament to the sharp beauty of a life lived in extremes.

I'm not one to usually read memoirs, as I personally prefer fiction. For the sake of the book club I dove right in. We only gave ourselves a week to read this one, as it was short and the print was fairly large.

Review

Reading this book almost made me feel like I was bipolar. The author intentionally wrote the book so that the chapters were not in chronological order.  It felt as though she did it to give the reader a sense of how lost she was, and how her personality shifted drastically. This became a little confusing at the beginning.  As I read, though, all these mysterious people she'd mention became know.  The book comes together in the end.  By the time I finished the first chapter, it had drawn me in.  I was both mortified and hooked.  Throughout the book, the author makes some decisions that caused me to momentarily judge her decisions, but I had to remind myself of everything she had gone through, and that her brain chemistry was far different than mine, and there was no way I could emphasize.  This book is a really eye-opener into this mental illness that affects far too many people.  4 out of 5 stars.