Madness: A Bipolar Life by Mary Hornbacher

I want to own this book. I feel at home with this woman through it. Her pain shocks me and her sweet sense of survival brings me to tears. Hornbacher does an amazing feat of writing from a first person stream of consciousness at the age of ten. She then writes from her childhood up to her womanhood days.

She communicates her life to us by episodes. Each episode is colored by sadness, depression, anger, euphoria, boredom, quiet joy, fear, anxiety, romance, and mania. Some chapters are short, some are long. It makes the book feel more like a journal than it does a novel. Her powers of phrasing and sentence structure amplify her content as she effectively communicates her states of mind to the reader. She does not mediate her experiences with her opinion, rather the reader is left to encounter for her- or his- self. Her honesty about her self and the world she sees is raw. Whether she is communicating her self focused reasons for falling in love with her second husband or strong fears of being left alone when depressed, the reader is left feeling that Hornbacher held nothing back in her telling.

Hornbacher’s ability to communicate without pulling punches satisfies the purpose of her book. She humanizes herself to her reader. She presents herself in all her beauty, strength, weakness, madness, and complexity and not as another case study. Her strong use of emotion and empathy in her episodes not only humanizes her but humanizes those who suffer along with her. The fear, pain, and compassion of her parents, her friends, her husbands, and her mental health counselors are evident in their care and communication with her. Her bipolar sickness is also demystified. It becomes less a capricious malady and more a disease with quirks and rhythms all its own. In short, Hornbacher, becomes less a woman who suffers and more a woman with a full, rich, deep life that is well worth living.

Madness: A Bipolar Life is 280 pages. It has appendices at the end that counter balance the narrative heavy story with Bipolar Facts, Useful Websites¸ and a Bibliography. She ends the book with a series of acknowledgements to those who supported her in this endeavor. This book is a wonderful resource to those seeking to understand and love those who suffer from Bipolar 1 disorder.