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4. Manic Lives: Mad Memoirs
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
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81 Mania has been recognized by physicians from the first century to the twenty- first century as both general madness and a form of madness with unique qualities . But no medical account can describe adequately what those who suffer mania experience. No description of mania in textbooks or asylum reports, and certainly not in genetic studies, measures up to the detail of firsthand accounts. Those who experience bipolar illness who write about their experiences are quite aware that they are symptomatic. Mental illness narratives have appeared in unprecedented numbers in the last decade, many of them in the form of bipolar autobiography. These writers know all too well the experience, not the theory, of writing as a storyteller with a pathological tale to tell. Andy Behrman’s memoir Electroboy, for instance, begins with an admission that there can be “a great deal of pleasure to mental illness.”1 He describes mania when it comes in episodes with familiar adjectives like “excitement” and “stimulation .” His mania creates what he specifically expresses as dreamlike states “similar to Oz.” He often confuses his manic episodes with his dreams––his senses overloaded and his head “cluttered with vibrant colors, wild images, bizarre thoughts, sharp details, secret codes, symbols, and foreign languages” (xix). Describing mania as “desperately trying to live life on a more passionate level,” he recalls flying from Zurich to the Bahamas and back in three days, spending $25,000 on a shopping spree, and binging on alcohol, sex, and drugs. And so Behrman also points out that mania is “about blips and burps of madness” (xvii). It is delusional Manic Lives mad memoirs It’s the first time I remember hearing the term manic depression, and it sounds serious to me, conjuring up images of patients running around a mental ward half naked in terrycloth slippers—it sounds like the word maniac. —Andy Behrman, Electroboy c h a p t e r 4 and irrational and out of control. It is buying twelve bottles of Heinz ketchup and eight bottles of Windex in the middle of a sleepless night or shoplifting a toothbrush and some Tylenol just for the high. Behrman is clear, however: “Pure mania is as close to death as I think I have ever come” (xix). He concludes his preface by emphasizing that the euphoric highs of mania were “out-of-control episodes that put my life in jeopardy.” There is no creative spirit or love for life driving mania and there is no controlling the insanity: “actions are random––based on delusional thinking, warped intuition, and animal instinct” (xxi). Memoirs like Behrman’s offer alternatives to the celebrity testimonies about the dangers of mania. Indeed, actor Patty Duke and television journalist Jane Pauley, for example, have published their stories in an effort to increase public awareness of the experience of mania as one state on a bipolar spectrum and to reduce the stigma associated with bipolar disorder.2 These memoirs offer hope for recovery and the experience of a return from illness to a kind of health. Unlike these celebrity memoirs, the memoirs considered throughout this chapter provide insight beyond the narrative identity of the celebrity. Rather than modeling the recovery or survival of a healthy and intact individual, these narratives offer another kind of credibility, detailing the always present chaos of the illness, a continuous threat without resolution .3 Printed by small presses or self-published, the narratives are those of ordinary individuals with bipolar illness. The writers draw purposeful and playful attention to a loss or suppression of memory and write about delusions and hallucinations, and the consequent unreliability of narrative authority when there is no way out. However, many literary theorists express skepticism regarding autopathography —that is, autobiography focused on or inspired by the influence of a disability , disease, or disorder on the author’s life—especially as autobiography itself has come under suspicion in the twenty-first century. The (im)possibility of writing autobiography of any kind as an act of self-representation in a postmodern age after the “death of the author” has put the integrity of the narrator and the reliability of the narrative in question. Nevertheless, as a response to such criticism, which threatens to undermine the reliability of autobiography as a literary form, authors like Dave Eggers have treated narrative less as the normative translation of an individual’s account of “what really happened” than as transgressive play with the trustworthiness of an author or the delivery a...