My family had recently shrunk to just my daughter Lizzie and me, the sum of a complicated mathematical equation involving subtracting one husband after adding severe mental illness. I’d spent the previous five years trying to make him take the medication that could control his bipolar disorder.

Five months after we separated, my new life seemed…normal. Or as much as it could be. Lizzie appeared to have quickly adjusted. She had started preschool and seemed happy, coming home each day chattering about friends and singing snippets of new songs, her clothing often speckled with bright tempera paint. Then one afternoon, I picked her up from school and ferried her to a playdate. The October afternoon felt as crisp as the apples she’d just eaten for snack while sitting on the school’s stoop.

My friend Jen and I settled into her thick cushioned sofa and gossiped about a particular mother from the playground who practiced laissez-faire parenting, sitting on a bench chatting on her cell phone as her son strong-armed yellow Tonka trucks and plastic shovels from other kids in the sandbox. As we talked, our daughters flitted about in the next room in gossamer wings and purple tulle tutus, shoving stuffed animals in a plastic shopping cart. I held a mug of tea in both hands, blowing on the steam.

I asked Jen if she’d mind if I borrowed her phone to check my messages. I was expecting a call from my ex-sister-in-law, Sarah. We’d made tentative plans to meet for a quick glass of wine (and hot cocoa for Lizzie) on our way home early that evening.

Instead of being greeted by my own recorded voice, a different one answered. For a split second I thought I’d misdialed, but the voice seemed too familiar. I’d heard it so often over the previous eighteen years. I must have gasped because Lizzie looked up from feeding a stuffed animal a plastic pear, concerned. I put on my responsible mom mask and smiled through the shock of hearing my ex answer my phone. He was in my apartment. But he didn’t live there—he didn’t have a key and I’d changed the locks as soon as he’d moved. I hung up without saying anything.

I felt an adrenaline surge. It was a bit like I was floating above my life, watching someone else’s, but at the same time it was also so real that it shimmered around the edges. This was the same disconnect I’d felt a few years earlier, when I called 911 while my ex wrestled with his seventy year old father over his car keys, my ex’s eyes wide from days of psychosis and nights without sleep. The police and medics came and took him to the hospital. Now, my ex had been out of a different hospital and off his meds for the previous few months. He’d called multiple times and angrily blamed me for his illness. When I let my machine pick up, he left disjointed, rambling messages. He’d send emails accusing me of poisoning him, telling me that one of my relatives was a devotee of Hitler and that I had better watch it. He had somehow broken into my apartment and I was scared to go home. Should I call the police? He was sick, not a criminal. When he was on his medication, he was gentle. But I was scared of him when he was off—unmedicated, he was unpredictable.

I whispered an abridged version to Jen and told her that I had to make one more call. Taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly, I tapped my ex-sister-in-law’s work number into the phone. While the children played, blissfully unaware, I quietly told Sarah what had happened. We decided Lizzie and I would spend the night with her and, in the morning after we’d dropped Lizzie off at school, we’d go back to my apartment and, if my ex was still there, make him leave. We weren’t quite sure how we’d accomplish this.

That night was a surreal slumber party. We ordered a pizza and played pretend, trying not to hint that anything was askew. Once Lizzie was asleep, Sarah and I talked softly, trying to decide whether we should call the police or not. We wanted him to get help, not arrested. We decided not to call.

The following morning, after dropping Lizzie off at preschool, we walked the mile or so to my apartment. I took out my keys and they jingled—my hands were shaking. I placed a key in the lock, turned and pushed open the door. Cigarette smoke clouded the apartment. When my ex lived with us, he never smoked inside. Three wine bottles, each half empty, were lined up in a row on the kitchen’s formica counter. The sink was filled with dishes. A cereal bowl had been used as an ashtray and was piled high with butts. There were damp green towels on the hardwood floor outside the bathroom. He’d been sick but hadn’t made it all the way to the toilet. As we stared at the debris surrounding us, my ex walked out of the bedroom, smiling. But his smile didn’t look real. It looked as if he was faking it, forcing his mouth to curl up at the edges.

“Hello!” he said, apparently pleased to see us, like we’d just dropped by for a cup of tea and some sugar cookies.

“Why are you here?” I asked, willing my voice to not quiver. He looked genuinely surprised.

“I live here.”

“How’d you get in?”

“Analiese gave me my key, of course.” Analiese was our upstairs neighbor.

He leaned over, towering above me. (Many people do, since I’m not quite 5’3”.) Suddenly I knew exactly what the term “in your face” meant. I reflexively took a step back.

Sarah—who is about the same height as my ex—stood up and stepped forward.

“You need to leave. If you don’t, we’ll have to call the police and you’ll go back to the hospital,” she said calmly and slowly, as if speaking to a child.

He seemed to think about this, weighing the possibility. He did not like the hospital.

He turned and walked out.

I locked the front door and flung open the back door and windows, keeping the iron security gates, pre-gentrification remnants, locked. I called the locksmith. Sarah helped me clean. We sprayed orange air freshener, coughing. Sarah rinsed bottles and dropped them in the recycling bin while I filled and started the dishwasher. I retched as I threw out vomit-caked towels and scrubbed the bathroom. We worked for hours, desperately trying to get the apartment back to normal before I picked Lizzie up from preschool. When the locksmith had replaced the locks and handed me two keys, I gave one to Sarah and kept one. Analiese wouldn’t get one. Later, when I asked Analiese why she’d given my ex a key, she said she was scared. She was home with her baby, alone, when he rang her doorbell. She opened the door and he stood too close to her, saying he knew she had a key—give it to him. She did.

By far, the vast majority of people who have mental illness are not violent or scary. If anything, they’re far more likely to be victims than victimizers. But with my ex, I just didn’t know him anymore. He had become a stranger and, when he was off his meds, I had to approach him as such, especially after all the anger he’d directed at me. Still, I was haunted by the “what ifs.” What if I hadn’t called home that day? What if Sarah hadn’t helped me? What if he just took his meds? Would he then be like many of the other people I know who have mental illness: pretty much undistinguishable from anyone else? Should we have called the police? Maybe we weren’t doing him any favors by keeping him out of the hospital. The better person who I was in my mind might have found a way to do things differently. But I was me and he wasn’t taking his medicine. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do. So you do what you can instead of what you wish you could do. Besides, when I’d contacted the police on previous occasions, they said there was nothing they could do unless he was a danger to himself or others.

Lizzie and I were “others.” And earlier hospitalizations hadn’t always helped. Some had kept him only as long as his insurance would pay. Others released him before he would have to appear before a judge, one who apparently rarely kept people in the hospital against their will.

My ex was the kind of person who fell through the cracks, cracks in his case as large as the Grand Canyon. Laws meant to protect the mentally ill from being hospitalized against their will kept him un- or under-medicated and ill. Sometimes it seemed the only thing that separated him from the unwashed man on the park bench muttering to himself was his family and his money.

Back in Brooklyn, after Sarah and I had cleaned, I looked around my apartment. Even though it looked better, it didn’t feel like it had before. It no longer felt safe. The sense of normalcy I’d felt vanished—it was like I’d been fooling myself, that it wasn’t over, that it never could be, that he’d invade when I wasn’t expecting it. After Sarah left I sat on the sofa and cried. Washing my face, I reapplied mascara on my puffy eyes and went to pick up Lizzie. That night was the first of many with a chair under the door.

Slowly—very slowly—over time, my house felt more like a home again. I got an order of protection and though it really offered no protection, the piece of paper somehow made me feel better, like I was doing what I could. My ex went back on his meds for a while, until he didn’t. And Lizzie never knew about why we really had our slumber party with her aunt.

***

Rumpus original art by Clare Nauman.

Related Posts:

• Sick
• That’s Life
• The Magic Bullet
• Mental Illnesses, Retroactively Diagnosed

“Relationship?” I’m always asked.

“Friend,” I always say.

The woman—it is the same woman every time—looks, at first, disinterested. She doesn’t even bother to raise her head. She types my name into her computer—click click, click click—but when she finds me, her face lights up.

“Oh, there you are,” she says, smiling, as if it’s possible I’ve disappeared.

Most days, I lean in while she’s typing. I like to ask my questions while she’s distracted, because there’s no filter. “How is he?” I’ll ask, as if it’s a sneak preview of what is yet to come.

She’ll say, “Oh, today he barely ate,” or, “Today he ate a bite of pancakes,” or, “Yesterday was a holiday, so they got a slice of vanilla cake.”

“Great,” I always say; I never know what else to say. What can be said of people who aren’t eating, who are only rarely allowed a slice of cake?

“Go ahead,” she says, nodding toward the door, and this is where my imagination comes in: I like to pretend that it’s a game. I like to pretend that the tiles—each big and glinting under the hallway’s fluorescent lights—are ice floes, their shape bobbing with my movement, their edges rocking from side to side.

Easy! I think. Easy!

I walk slowly, carefully, imagining first polar bears and then penguins, tiny fish, blue-green water. I imagine men in thatched canoes, rowing toward some distant shore.

“Careful,” I sometimes say. To anyone else, this might seem wrong, but I have to pretend it’s a game—having a friend in a place like this.

Some mornings, I walk to my mailbox and attempt to predict what’s waiting there: a list of the books Kevin’s read most recently, a request for photos of a Matisse painting. Send me The School of Athens by Raphael, he writes. Send me The Red Vineyard, or The Sower, or The Round of the Prisoners by Vincent Van Gogh.

Sometimes, Kevin just wants a picture—of me, of Iowa, of anyone. Send me some from college, he says. I’m beginning to forget your faces.

I oblige him every time: I head down to the public library, type in my username, print in color. Or I look up French kings on Wikipedia and print all twelve pages, including citations. I stand beside the librarian’s desk and say, “The printer’s out of ink,” or, “The printer’s out of paper.”

I pay fifty cents a page, but there’s no way for me to know the things a man like Kevin needs. If I were in a place like this, I think, I hope someone would do this for me. Because what if I wanted to learn a new language? What if I still wanted to feel moved by art?

So these games, they make this fun. They are the only things that do. They suppress the grinding panic, the feeling that a child is sitting cross-legged on my chest. This is how I refer to it now, the seizing anxiety I feel when I think of Kevin. I joke to friends and family, because it’s the only way I know to cope. I say, “Today the child is patient.”

I say, “Today, there’s a temper tantrum.”

Some days, it feels like a million tiny feet grinding deep into my esophagus—everything seizes up, and I find it difficult to breathe.

So polar bears and seals. Harpoons and men in hats.

Crazy, you might think, but I will imagine whatever it takes.

When I reach the end of the empty hallway, I always pause before the door. When I open it, I know, Kevin and I will see each other for the first time in weeks, and just what his face will do—well, there’s really no way of knowing. When I open that door, things will happen, so I always wait a second longer. There’s a pleasure in that waiting. I may not know what’s yet to come, but I know that I alone control it.

“Okay,” I say to no one. I open the door, and there he is. I take a seat in the chair beside him and try to look happy to be so close. “Hi,” I say, smiling.

“Hello,” he always says.

Our conversations are strained at first. Often Kevin is weak, lethargic, so I try to warm him up. I ask about the cafeteria food, or the holiday, or the way he spends his time.

“Are you eating?” I ask, and he nods a subtle yes. “Good,” I always say. “You need to preserve your strength.”

When it’s his turn, he asks about the weather, or he asks what I’ve been reading. On the days he feels uncomfortable, he asks these questions quicker.

“It’s not like I really know,” he reminds me. “Not really, anyway.”

Kevin is allowed outside only twice a week, and his recreational field is just a splintered picnic table and a patch of dusty grass he politely calls “the courtyard.” The rest of the time, he looks at snow or sun or rain through glass an inch and a half thick, smudged, gray and gauzy.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Today it’s hot,” or, “Today there’s snow.”

When we exhaust the subject of weather, I ask about Scrabble. Scrabble, more than anything, is what keeps Kevin calm. He says it keeps him “sane.” This is what he writes in letters and stories, and what he tells even his mother when she asks him how he’s doing.

“He loves that game,” she told me once, as if I somehow didn’t know.

Kevin sends me a letter once a month, even despite my visits, because, he says, the written word affords him a certain sincerity. On the page, he can be more honest—he can say that no, he is not eating. That he thinks of it as a silent protest. That Scrabble helps him remain articulate and keep a sharp, fine-tuned mind. That most of all, he likes it because it reminds him of when we were students in college together. “Placate,” he writes. It used up all my tiles.

In letters, Kevin can tell me, too, that he is lonely, or that lately he feels scared. On several occasions, he’s used the word “diseased,” as in, “I feel like something diseased.” Like an animal, he says. Like something locked inside a cage.

But when I visit, Kevin smiles. He is mild-mannered. He asks what I’m listening to or for a recap of his favorite shows. What’s new in True Blood, he wants to know, and what does Sookie Stackhouse look like now?

“Straight hair,” I say, or, “Curly. She’s wearing a lot of dresses.”

Kevin has a crush on Sookie, although he will not admit it. He jokes he wishes he could read minds the way that she does, but I am very glad he can’t.

“Anyway, Scrabble is good,” he says. “Yesterday I beat Vinni.”

Vinni is the man who lives across from Kevin, and though he has only a ninth grade education, he usually puts up a pretty good fight.

“He almost got me,” Kevin says. “But I had a triple letter score on a y.”

Neither one of us knows why Vinni is here; we are both afraid to ask. But it is these moments, more than any others, that make me feel relieved. I am glad to hear about Kevin’s games. There are worse things Kevin could be doing with his time than playing a game of Scrabble, like, for example, not playing a game of Scrabble. On the days I don’t visit, I imagine him sitting on his cot, staring up at that blank white ceiling, imagining not ice floes at all but the days, endless as glaciers, and how he might not make it through them. Kevin sees a therapist here, someone who is coaching him through this process, this strange new lifestyle. She is supposed to make the transition easier, but it seems she only makes him angry. In his letters, he sends me updates: she’s diagnosed him with depression, or she’s diagnosed him as suicidal. Do you believe her? he writes. Of course I’m depressed, living in a place like this.

On the days I don’t visit, I see Kevin holding a plastic knife, the one they give him at every meal. It is a knife meant for frozen pizza or a baked potato, and it is dull, but still, I imagine him carving it somehow, flicking the plastic against the cinderblock until it is clean and sharp and smooth. I see him pressing it to his skin, so thin and white as paper, and I imagine him scraping. Digging. Carving.

I think, The next time I come to see my friend, he will no longer be living here.

The woman at the front desk will tell me he’s not eating, that now he’s not even breathing.

So I like to think of him playing Scrabble.

“What about you?” Kevin asks me, and again I don’t know what to say. Sometimes, I think of telling Kevin the truth: that life is good, very good, because I can move around and walk through alleyways and eat a sprinkled donut. I can put on headphones and listen to Bon Iver and pretend the world is my movie, that what I’m seeing is only mine, that the way the light bends across a cemetery or the way a bird angles in flight are things given to me because I am not sick like Kevin. I can feel a moment of melancholy and trust it will go away. I can eat apple pie, even if it’s not a holiday, and I can wear green, or red, or rings carved from emerald or jade. I can ride a bicycle or spray paint it blue or kiss a boy for hours on a fraying couch while a TV plays. I can stay up all night if I want, eating Raisin Bran and watching cartoons, or I can drive to Niagara Falls or hike a mountain or tie my shoes. I want to say to Kevin that life was better when he could do these things beside me—see a midnight movie, just drive around—and that since he’s been away, I haven’t ordered Chinese once, because who will eat the water chestnuts? They would just sit there on my plate.

Instead, I tell him work is work and that often I’m very tired. “Life is exhausting, frankly,” I say, because I want him to remember what it’s like outside of this place—how it can be good, but it’s not everything.

That sometimes I, too, feel very bad.

“I work until six most days,” I say. “I get out, and I just want to sleep.”

“I know what you mean,” he says, nodding. “That’s all I do with my afternoons.”

Kevin tells me things like this, and of course I feel awful, because of course I know it’s true. At least, I think, at least my day ends, and I can come home and watch Toddlers & Tiaras, and it doesn’t matter the show is awful because at least I can choose to watch it.

But Kevin can do none of these things. He cannot even hug someone, which is why, on my last visit, we decided to make a secret gesture. What happened was this: I was leaving, and I told Kevin I wished I could hug him right then, because he was making a face that broke my heart. But in this place, that’s not allowed, so I said, “How about I squint my eyes and mush my face and round my upper lip into my nose, and this can be our own no-contact friendship hug?”

“Like a bunny,” he said, laughing, and then he mushed his cheeks and twitched his nose.

But now I see rabbits everywhere and always think of him.

“The good times,” Kevin says. “Do you remember all the good times?”

I do. And there were years like that, I remind myself when I need to. There were four whole years of friendship before this happened,and yet when I think of Kevin now I only ever think of this place, this smell, this lighting.

“Well,” I say, “I should get going,” and as I head back down the hallway, I always make my footsteps loud. Klunk, klunk, klunk, klunk, because I want Kevin to hear the weight of me. I want him to know that I am there for as long as I am there.

In the parking lot, in my car, I sit and look up at his building. There he is, I tell myself, and there he’ll stay. And then I drive home picturing it: how now they’re dimming the lights, now they’re checking he’s in bed, now they’re ensuring he’s blinking and breathing and present and alive.

I slip into my house, or I slip into a bar, or I slip between the cushions of a couch next to a body, and because I visit with regularity, eventually people ask. They ask, and I always tell them that my friend Kevin is in a hospital.

“He’s sick,” I say, shrugging, and the place I go to has specific hours because it is a ward, not a prison. He’s a patient, not an inmate. “He needs me,” I say, though I’m no longer certain that’s even true.

Of course I don’t admit what really happened: that my friend Kevin experienced a psychotic breakdown three weeks before our college graduation. He walked me home and then returned to his own apartment, where he murdered a young woman with a kitchen knife from a set bought at Wal-Mart. Kevin stabbed that poor girl twenty-seven times in the neck and upper torso, then phoned the local police, saying he was so sorry, and would they come?

He said, “I’ll be waiting for you outside.”

It would sound far-fetched even to me—the idea of a psychotic breakdown, of a dissociative episode that renders a man unaccountable for his actions. Even now, I watch the news and see a violent man—Jared Loughner, James Holmes, now Adam Lanza—and think, That’s exactly what happened to Kevin.

My friend is not Adam Lanza, of course. He did not walk into an elementary school and shoot children, one by one. There are many, many differences. But what happened to Kevin is, for all intents and purposes, the same: he was sick, and no one knew.

In a mental evaluation completed just weeks after Kevin’s arrest, one doctor wrote, It is my professional opinion that Kevin demonstrated signs of impaired functioning prior to and at the time of the offense, and therefore lacked the capacity to comprehend the wrongfulness of his actions and conform his behaviors to the requirements of the law.

I believe, reads another, he had no thought of ever killing her.

And finally, there is this: This is truly a tragic case.

In the days immediately following the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, the Huffington Post published a provocative article by mother Liza Long, who articulates her own experience raising a mentally ill, gifted but oftentimes unpredictable, violent teen.

“I love my son,” she writes, “but he terrifies me.”

In her article, Long articulates the difficult moment of involuntarily committing her son to a psychiatric hospital after he threatened himself and his siblings. Later, Long discusses her options with her son’s social worker, who states the only real solution is to charge him with a crime, thereby creating a paper trail and inviting the possibility of incarceration—a long-lasting, consequential measure. “That’s the only way you’re ever going to get anything done,” the social worker tells her. “No one will pay attention to you unless you’ve got charges.”

“I don’t believe my son belongs in jail…” Long writes, “but it seems like the United States is using prison as the solution of choice for mentally ill people.”

And the inverse is true, as well. Because of our own refusal to eliminate the stigmas of mental illness and advocate effective, long-lasting treatment, prison is the inevitable ending place for those who are mentally ill and suffering. According to the Human Rights Watch, the rate of inmate mental illness is five times that of the general population, and since 2001, it’s been rising steadily with every year.

I knew Kevin was suffering from depression. I knew he had once been suicidal. During the fall of our junior year, he was required to take a medical leave of absence to resolve suicidal ideation. That was the official term. But what happened, when put simply, is that he filled a tub with water. He took the radios, stereos, and speakers from the bedrooms of his roommates, placed them along the rim, and prepared to enter.

And yet, after his return in the winter of 2008, just a little over a year before his psychotic breakdown, I never discussed that experience with him. I never asked him how he felt, or how it was that he felt now. Mental illness seemed too taboo, too intimate a conversation to share between two friends. It seemed some secret, private burden—one I, and many others, thought he could carry on his own.

Now, in the three years since it happened, I myself have been diagnosed with PTSD, as I was the last person Kevin saw that night, the last woman before he killed her. I’ve been diagnosed with depression. I’ve seen my own relationships fall apart as a direct result of that trauma, that fear, and I’ve flinched when a man touched my neck a bit too firmly. I often go for walks. I have been told, again and again, “You have to stop thinking about this.” Once, on a very turbulent flight, I watched as mothers clung to daughters, couples to one another, and my first thought was not, God help me, or I love my parents, or even No, but At least if we go down, I’ll finally stop thinking about what he did.

In the meantime, I am incapable. I think about it all the time. And it seems impossible to me even still: how somehow, in some way, a mind can break, as if it were a toy.

Worse yet, I don’t know the solution. I don’t know what to say. I often thought that by this far out—over three years—I’d be able to look at what Kevin did, and it would seem a distant pinpoint, something small on the horizon, something I could identify as a pivotal moment in my development that I experienced and then moved on from. The past is, after all, the past. Instead, it remains large and looming, shaping not only my own experience of our friendship—my silence and that hesitation—but my very present and inevitable future. I walk my dog now beside the reservoir and of course I think of him. It’s like momentum, I want to say, and what I mean is how it looks when a rock strikes a body of water—how ripples can form and move even long after the stone has sunk. I want to say that this is not the case. You were not the one affected, I often think. But my friend is in jail, and will be for twenty-seven to fifty years, and I still don’t understand what happened. I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, and so I visit. I write letters. I ask, “How are the Scrabble games going?”

It was easier when I could think the way that everyone else seems to think: that a brain is just a brain, iconic in its structure. I used to picture gray strands, film, all of it looped and loped together. Now I see apartment buildings, poorly constructed and impossibly built, the kind you find along highways. I picture homes stacked above other homes, people cooking omelets on broken burners, heaters plugged in and oscillating. Most days, the residents of these homes live peacefully among one another—they take showers, sing songs, and bake brownies—but one day, an oven’s left on. Or someone forgets to unplug the iron. Or maybe that’s not it, either—maybe the people have nothing to do with it at all. But still come these chemical explosions, far too small and too complex to see, sending red, sparking embers into the drywall of our minds.

“Fire!” we say. “Fire!” But still we stand there and watch it burn.

***

Listen to Amy read her essay:

Rumpus original art by Liam Golden.

Related Posts:

• That’s Life
• Through the Cracks
• The Magic Bullet
• “Living in the Shaky Place”
• Mental Illnesses, Retroactively Diagnosed

I tumble out of bed in a panic like I do every morning, searching for my phone, which I can’t find, as usual. Its alarm is going off, but it has fallen off the side of my bed and is buried in a sea of books and dirty clothes, so I stumble over to my computer, which I leave on every night because it’s old and takes ten minutes to boot up. I know this is good for neither the environment nor the computer, but when I wake up I know I likely won’t find my phone until I’ve drank some coffee and popped the Xanax the therapist tells me to take. And I can’t do anything until I check my email and the news to make sure everything is okay, knowing full well that the news will assure me that the opposite is true.

But as I run my hand over the touchpad to bring the screen alive, an open miniature paper notebook off to the right of my computer catches my eye. Now I’ve forgotten about my email and phone, even though the alarm is still going off. It’s one of the little journals I bought from Walgreen’s when I didn’t have enough money to buy a nicer one, with that black and white textured school binder cover and binding made of glue that falls apart the second I touch it. I like journals just the size I can fit in my pocket, so I can take them everywhere, even though half the time I forget a pen. They are perfect for lists and stray thoughts. This notepad, I remember, is mostly full of to-do lists from my several jobs, none of which pay me enough to take care of myself.

The notebook is open. On the page it’s open to, there is no to-do list. There, in capital, shaky letters unmistakably written by me, I find the words:

“NOT

UP

TO

THE

CHALLENGE.”

The word CHALLENGE takes up the entire bottom half of the page.

I have no memory of writing these words. I am slightly hung-over, which I could ignore, except that this note is sitting here, reminding me that alcohol is not good for me, that it might have caused a blackout.

But I also know this is wishful thinking. I’d barely drank anything the night before. I’d had a couple glasses of wine, maybe, and I’d chatted online with my friends, because that’s what I do now, now that I’ve moved to Los Angeles: I sit in my room and chat with people on the Internet who live far away, in Oaxaca, in San Francisco, in Denver.

On the opposite side of the notebook, I’ve written something worse, something so whiny and full of angst that I’m ashamed it’s also in my handwriting. It says, “What if I could just disappear? What if I could just make it so I never existed?” This writing is even less clear; it is scratched in letters only I could read, and it is a thought I’ve had many times before.

I loathe suicide. In college, at Santa Cruz, I was playing pool with my friends in the lounge, and I was probably losing, like I always was. I heard a loud crack. Everyone said, “What was that?” But I thought nothing of it. Then someone came in—I can’t remember who—panting, and they said someone had just fallen off a balcony and died. We all sat there, stunned, not sure how to react. Eventually, the woman I was dating asked if I wanted to go with her to her kitchen to get something to eat.

We thought the body would have been removed by then, but we were wrong. Most of it was covered with a sheet, but the top of the head was not. The body—a man—had his head blown out. The crack I’d heard, it turned out, was a shotgun blast from a fourth floor balcony. I later learned he had an American flag tied around his ankles. It was dark or dusk as we walked by, I can’t exactly remember that either. There were little bits of shadow around him, little bits of what I imagine were flesh and brains and blood but could have just as easily been kicked-up dirt. I felt no sadness or shock as I walked by the body. I felt my heart speed up, but besides that, there was nothing.

The woman I was going to the kitchen with said, “Well, I didn’t need to see that.”

“I didn’t either,” I said and excused myself to my room. The school hired therapists outside for us to talk to. I did not talk to them. I hid under my sheets, unable to move until the next day. I don’t think I moved that entire night.

The whole next day, friends of the man who committed suicide played Sinatra’s “That’s Life” on repeat at top volume into the quad. It rained even though I couldn’t see the clouds, a strange phenomenon that sometimes happens in Santa Cruz because of where it sits between the mountains and the ocean. I later heard that the night proctor Wayne, a former cop, local legend and friend of every student in the dorms, had been given the task of cleaning the brains off the ground. The next time I saw him he had cut off his trademark long hair.

I still wonder about the man who committed suicide. Was he trying to be cruel? Or was he just trying to make some kind of statement? Was he trying to warn us of something?

To this day, when I think about seeing the body, I feel nothing. But when I think about Wayne scraping up the brains, I feel nothing but rage.

I feel like my mind has been unraveling slowly, and this angers me.

Three of my parents are psychologists, and one is a psychiatrist. Yes, all four: my dad, my mom, my stepdad, and my stepmom. I love each of them. Still, I feel like having any form of mental illness means they somehow won, that they had been right every time they were “worried about me,” that they had used their science to understand me better than I understood myself, that I had been wrong to resist their worldview because I resented so much feeling like a specimen. At one point, I was literally a subject in something called “The Nice-Mean Study,” which is about what it sounds like. I’m angry about this, but I don’t blame them; I think they thought of it as a kindness, that I could be a part of their lives that they cared about so much. And, of course, they believed their professions were beneficial.

At Santa Cruz, one of my parents sometimes sent me care packages full of SSRI antidepressants in the mail. I never took them. I held on to them, though, and at the end of college, I threw a party where I put all the pills in candy bowls. I did not encourage people to take them. I was just making a statement. One guy did take a few of them. Nothing happened.

It was a good thing I didn’t take them, my therapist later told me, because the antidepressants would have made me the kind of crazy where I wouldn’t have been able to stop laughing, where I wouldn’t have needed sleep, where I would have woken up on the other side of the world not knowing why I had a bucket of gold Krugerrands. SSRI’s are harmless to most people, but in the wrong hands, they can ruin lives.

If the wrong person had taken those pills, I could have destroyed someone, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about. I was thinking about making a statement. I wish I could say it was a remotely intelligent statement. Maybe something about the overuse of antidepressants, the fact that we use so many they are ending up in our water supply, or that we as a society need to learn to deal with our problems without making everything into a disease. I knew about those arguments, sure, but what I really wanted to say was something much simpler: I didn’t need any help. I could do this on my own.

Upon moving to LA, I was greeted by this city like—as my friend put it—a proctologist greets his patients. The day I arrived at the place where I’d be housesitting (which was, to its credit, beautiful, and a kindness on its own), a woman I liked showed up with a six pack of beer to tell me she not only had a boyfriend but also had fucked another good friend, someone from whom I’d been getting advice about her. My situation did not improve from there. Soon, I found myself unemployed, moving from couch to couch, and eventually, I had to rent from someone I had just started dating, which worked out about as well as you might think it would.

Desperate not to have to move home, desperate for anything to work, I swallowed my pride and scrounged up money to see a shrink. She told me that I was severely depressed and suspected I had bipolar II, which is like bipolar light, except it makes me more likely to kill myself. She gave me pills, ones that made the people I was sleeping with think I was having nightmares about wrestling lions. The pills were originally meant to stop epilepsy, but it seemed they were giving me seizures. When I told my shrink about this, she suggested the pediatric dose. The pharmacist looked at me, concerned, and said, “I hope these help your little one.” They were chewable and tasted like Flintstones vitamins.

The pediatric dose did not stop the fits.

Finally, she gave me a not-dangerous kind of antidepressant and some Xanax. I was able to get my shit together, moderately, at least, until not remembering writing that damn note.

The day before the not remembering, my therapist mentioned four letters in passing: PTSD. I was talking about my struggles writing, about how I just had too many things coming up, that I felt like every time I wrote I was just listing shitty things that happened to me, that I wanted nothing more than to write a funny essay about farts. My writing was becoming lists. Just lists of horrors I’d lived through. Lists like this, lists that are hopelessly incomplete, lists that (I’ve counted) go on for twelve handwritten pages, lists that, on top of that suicide, include:

1)   One of the first women I ever kissed—I was thirteen and the only boy in a game of spin-the-bottle—was stabbed 31 times and strangled with a belt by her boyfriend. This was 13 years later. It was broadcast in the papers because he was in the country illegally. No one called to invite me to the memorial because I hadn’t told any of my high school friends I was in town.

2)   My childhood best friend had his life altered terribly by a car accident caused by black ice and a sociopathic passenger. I went to visit him in the hospital, and saw part of his skull plate missing, which meant at one point I actually saw his brain. Even though he was nonresponsive, I looked at his brain and talked to him for a long time, because the doctors said hearing friends’ voices might help. Try as I might, I can’t remember what color the brain was, but I do know that he survived, even though they all said he would die.

3)   My neo-Nazi cousin nearly killed a man with a bow and arrow right in front of me, just because that man was black. But he did not let go of the arrow, thank God, and now that man is still alive. I can’t stop thinking about it, even now, even thirteen years later.

None of these things actually happened to me. They happened near me. Shouldn’t I be tougher than this?

My first reaction to my shrink mentioning PTSD was that I hoped my insurance company wouldn’t find out. Then I thought of worse things that have happened to people I’ve known or loved, that my list didn’t count because it’s not as horrible, because there is always something more horrible.

Then I thought about how everything seemed to touch me somehow, just a little bit, about how I used to film lacrosse games for extra money, sometimes at Columbine, which was just a few miles from my school. The massacre happened one year after I graduated high school. I walked into my dorm room where my roommate was watching it on TV and saw a bloody body fall out of a building I used to see all the time. A distant acquaintance, I later learned, was among the dead. I remember the mass depression that overtook the country, but especially my family and friends in Colorado, just by virtue of proximity.

Then I thought about the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, which also happened when I was a student in Santa Cruz. A family friend had been in the first plane, though I had only met him once, and I’m not even sure if it was him that I met. But I do know that my family was very shaken up by it. I told my professor—who was angry at imperialism instead of the terrorists—that talking about imperialism wouldn’t bring him back. She bought me more drinks and said she was worried about me, that she thought it wasn’t really him I was upset about.

That night, I walked to my girlfriend’s house, tearing down every miniature American flag I saw—probably about two dozen of them—including one where I accidentally ripped off a car antenna along with the flag (I left a note of apology for the antenna and a ten dollar bill—it was all I had) until I got to the full-sized flag at the entrance to the Motel 6 by the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. I started tearing it down, and the Pakistani woman who worked there ran out and looked at me.

She said, “What are you doing?”

I had no answer, so I left the flag hanging there all limp on its now-bent pole. I went to the beach and slept there for about an hour. But it was very cold, so I went to my girlfriend’s apartment—where she literally slept in a closet. She woke up to open the door, said nothing and let me cuddle up next to her, no questions asked, sand in my hair and all over my clothes.

And now here it is, twelve years later, and I’m spending days in bed, even though I can’t, even though I am working 50 to 80 hours a week, doing a damn good job when I’m there. But still, somehow, I manage to spend entire days in bed, in silence, staring at the ceiling, not listening to music, not cruising the Internet, just staring, cursing every time the ice cream truck drives by my window because of that God damned song. It’s not even that it drives by; it actually parks in front of my fucking house just to make me crazy. My therapist calls what I’m doing “dissociating.” I want to pour a coke in the engine of the ice cream truck. I want to take a sledgehammer to its speakers. For a moment, I want to be cruel. It is ruining everything. I don’t know what this is. I just know I can’t control it.

That’s the thing I hate. I can’t control it. I can’t control that I can do nothing but sit inside in that goddamned room and stare at the ceiling. I have no idea who wrote that note, even though I know it was me.

So now what? I wish I could write: “Oh, wow, those times were hard, but now that I’ve finally gotten on the right medication, and now that I’m well-adjusted and my skin is shining the sheen of the healthy and I never forget to take my omega-3, and I’ve popped out three kids with a beautiful partner and am drinking carrot juice and ginger smoothies in Park Slope, Brooklyn, now I can tell you this story and laugh and explain everything.”

But this is not me yet, if it ever will be, because right now, I am the definition of “mentally ill.” If I write this essay, I have to ask: Will I survive? Will my twenty different bosses fire me? Will whatever “respectability” I have as a writer or adjunct or teacher or tutor or nonprofit professional go to shit? Will my health insurance find the article and raise my rates? What’s worse, will I turn into a social leper? Will people be afraid of me? Will anyone ever want to sleep with me again?

Will anybody read it?

Lately, for unspeakable reasons, everyone has been talking about how everything in the world is terribly wrong. People are blaming guns and poor mental health services, but I get the sense that these are not the only things wrong, that there is something more.

It goes beyond this problem of “the stigmatization of mental illness.” Sure, that scares me, but there’s a thing that runs deeper. I can’t name it, exactly, and I certainly don’t know what to do about it, but I think it has to do with how we think about compassion and empathy and cruelty and survival.

I see it in the bloody newscasts of school shootings and disasters with special graphics and Hollywood effects for ratings. I see it when I donate money to a President who kills innocent children with drones. I see it as I take money from people I shouldn’t be taking money from because I have to pay rent. I saw this in my cousin’s swastika tattoos, in his pulling out his bow in arrow, in his not letting go. I saw this in the way I and so many of my high school alumni rallied around my friend after his accident, and in the way we turned away from him in the years after because we “had to move forward.” I saw this in the cruelty of the newspaper articles when one of the first girls I kissed was murdered, in the way the reporters would not leave her mother alone, in the way I am now writing about it still.

It all makes me want to make a statement. I want to write the world off as brutish and cruel, to go all Gordon Gecko, or maybe Don Draper, to stop worrying about the people around me and start looking out for number one, maybe learn Parkour, or at the very least learn to throw a punch. At first, the world seems a lot less maddening when I start to think this way because I think it gives me some control.

In parts of academia, in a staggering act of linguistic defeatism, social scientists call those who believe that people are inherently self-serving “realists.”

Fuck them. I’d rather go mad than be a “realist.” There is something I can control.

I know for a fact it’s more complicated than that.

Once, I saw a woman with her left eyeball popped out of her head at a concert, dangling from its socket, with surprisingly little blood on her face. Whenever I think of it, I can’t forget her look, the shock of having her body altered permanently, that one of the most important parts of her had just been removed and would never work the same again.

I hope they found a way to reattach her eye. I hope she can see perfectly now. All of her friends had abandoned her. People were walking on the other side of the hall, as far from her as possible, including me. Except for the bouncer, she was completely alone, and what scared her most, I think, was the fear in my eyes, in the eyes of the people walking near me.

The bouncer stood there next to her, smiling, telling her she’d be okay, that help was on its way, massaging her shoulders, dabbing as much of the blood away as he could.

Maybe that’s what it means to be up to the challenge.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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Unlike the sensationalism with which Six Feet Under handled brother Billy’s bipolar disorder, Homeland feels more accurate—intensity that bothers other people, sleeplessness, untethering of signs from meaning, rapidity of speech, flights of thought, heaviness, sorrow, and the slow, thick movements of the depressed person who realizes she needs correction to function in society.

By the last episode, the audience knows that Carrie’s not crazy. Sadly, she doesn’t. Nobody understands the mechanism by which electroconvulsive therapy works.

So, desperate to correct her bipolar disorder and revive the life her bipolar disorder has wrecked, Carrie opts for ECT. As she goes under, she forgets the critical evidence linking Brordy to terrorist Abu Nazir (which would have proven she was not crazy).

Homeland is the best paranoid fantasy I’ve ever seen, a suspenseful, well-plotted narrative interpretation that seems to say, “you’re not paranoid if they’re really out to get you.” It is also one of the best depictions of bipolar disorder I’ve seen onscreen, the brilliance savaged by uncontrollable emotion and fear. I say this as somebody whose break with reality at age twenty-seven was similar, even though it was not relevant to a larger narrative, the question of national security.

Nobody understands the mechanism by which electroconvulsive therapy works. It erases memories, a narrative device that Homeland is taking advantage of. It’s a way to start over, to wipe the slate clean. I wonder if erasing memories is a side effect of ECT, or an integral part of the remaking of oneself that occurs when trying to recover from a deeply disquieting psychotic episode.

***

The concept of the magic bullet was developed by Paul Ehrlich, a physician and scientist who died in 1915 in Germany. He believed that it should be possible to create a compound that selected a disease-causing organism, as well as delivering a toxin to kill it.

If you’re a psychiatric patient resistant to the use of pharmaceutical drugs, you’ll soon discover that most psychiatrists require you to be on medication as part of treatment. Psychiatric drugs are the answer almost all the time. “If you don’t like the way we do it here, you can find another doctor,” said a prominent psychiatrist at Stanford to a patient concerned about weight gain, citing a story about a patient who was functioning well on Lithium, who went off and a year later was on the roof of the hospital, wild-haired and ready to jump.

Antipsychotics treat the entire person as a disease-causing organism. They select the entire person for regeneration or for destruction. For as many people as they help to function in society, they sedate, squash, destroy, the spirit of others. As far back as 1979, the American psychiatric community has been aware of a WHO study that showed that people who suffered a schizophrenic break in India, Nigeria, or Columbia had a higher chance of fully recovering than those who suffered the same in the United States.

In his book Mad in America, Robert Whitaker argues that these very different countries with good rates of recovery are different from the United States in one important respect—the medical care. The poor countries can’t afford those magic bullets, the psychiatric drugs that American culture demands you get on if you want to be respectable.

Of course, it’s possible that the sampling in other countries is skewed. In India, anyway, there is less awareness of mental illness as a physical condition. Dualism is taken for granted. Mental illness is a soul sickness. And people hide it, at least from people outside their families.

***

Organizations in America to reduce stigma have done incredible work, creating a kind of water cooler around mental illness, a space in which it’s mostly safe to out yourself… unless of course you actually want to be one of the leaders of the fight against stigma, a voice in the debate about how mental illness is treated and talked about.

“Well, it’s not really a disease,” noted one kind-hearted, elderly psychiatrist who was, unbeknownst to him, in mixed company at a meeting for one of these organizations. “But it’s what we need to call it.” It’s the only way insurers will pay for the expensive treatments available.

In November 2004, Proposition 63 was passed, allowing the California Department of Mental Health to provide increased resources toward county mental health programs. In Santa Clara County, where I live, the most vocal people at the Mental Health Stakeholders’ meetings are family members. I don’t feel like anything gets accomplished at these debates about how the Proposition 63 money is allocated, but evidently things get decided eventually. If you go to these meetings, everyone is as nice as can be.

But, it’s dumbfounding to me how much the discussion is dominated by family members as stakeholders, rather than “consumers” of mental health services. The consumers do speak, but there’s a subtle layer of condescension if they announce themselves as consumers. If a family member speaks, however, he or she gets unbridled sympathy. The participation levels highlight how many of the leaders in the movement to remove stigma from mental illness are family members of people with illnesses (or claim to be family members), rather than the individuals themselves.

Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps these are people in hiding, people for whom the stigma is so significant and painful and personal that they imagine everyone else holds the same kind of stigma around the topic. And therefore they don’t out themselves, but focus instead on telling a story about a family member.

But I don’t think I’m wrong. The assumption is that people with mental illnesses are voiceless, can’t speak for themselves in a way that is reliable, in a way that other people want to hear or be led by. People want to hear stories of mental illness, but they don’t want to hear it from the people on the frontlines, the ones being devastated. Those, apparently, are too depressing.

The same bias operates in the publishing industries. Readers eat up stories that come from a sufferer like Kay Redfield Jamison who is also an authority figure, or a celebrity like Catherina Zeta-Jones, but they don’t want the story of the man sitting next to them on the bus who shifts in and out of reality as he speaks. Readers love the well-crafted, newsy piece written by a sister or father quietly or poignantly observing what schizophrenia looks like on the outside. Or the finely-observed novel written by someone who has worked among the mentally ill.

Don’t get me wrong. There is wisdom and beauty that emerges from the stories of people who are exposed to mental illness, but do not suffer it. But those aren’t the only stories, the only truths.

***

Right now, the medical model is on the rise, and very few people talk about the existential aspects of mood disorders and schizophrenia. As the controversial psychiatrist R.D. Laing wrote in The Politics of Experience, “Existential thinking offers no security, no home for the homeless. It addresses no one except you and me. It finds its validation when, across the gulf of our idioms and styles, our mistakes, errings and perversities, we find in the other’s communication an experience of relationship established, lost, destroyed, or regained. We hope to share the experience of a relationship, but the only honest beginning, or even end, may be to share the experience of its absence.”

People expect those who suffer to submit to the embarrassment and pain of correction, not to muddy the literary pool with their more difficult writings, their experimentation, their grief. Be happy! the television ads for atypical antipsychotics promise us. Never mind the footnote: the nausea, the tremendous weight gain, the dizziness, the anxiety, the cognitive dulling, or the akathisia that makes you want to run to Alaska or New Orleans, whichever is further, just to get away from yourself.

 ***

Pathology can be competitive. Unlike real life, if you enter any psychiatric hospital, the key to socializing is to suffer more intensely than the person next to you. You usually don’t talk about the news or the last book you read. You talk about diagnosis, about pills, about the trustworthiness of the doctors (by and large, they aren’t seen as trustworthy, and this perception, too, is pathologized).

Sometimes diagnosis is how the intensity of suffering is measured. So, for example, the person branded with Bipolar I, who careens between mania and depression with layovers of psychosis, is higher in the hospital hierarchy than the person with garden-variety depression or even the person who has been diagnosed with Bipolar II who may suffer from severe depression, but only hits the mild high of hypomania. The people in the lockdown ward are more hardcore than those in the “voluntary” ward. Being hospitalized marks you as a more serious case than a person who has never been hospitalized.

It’s the patients who’ve had electroconvulsive therapy that are given the most credibility in the psych wards. Unlike being on Prozac or Wellbutrin these days, if you’ve experienced electroconvulsive therapy, you win as far as being considered fucked up goes. While many patients guard this experience outside the psych ward—it’s not something you slip into casual conversation—inside the hospital it’s a different story.

I met a young woman once who had lost a couple of her kids briefly because of her illness. “Electroshock’s better than Seroquel or Abilify,” she said. “It works for a few years and then you need it again.” This in spite of the hair loss, the memory loss, the loss of dignity. (You don’t get fat from ECT.)

 ***

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of our society’s emphasis on correction over empathy and tolerance is its concurrent fascination with the life of the artist/writer suicide—the person who suffered so much, he or she stopped talking and just did it. Earlier this year, in the hubbub surrounding what would have been David Foster Wallace’s fiftieth birthday, Jonathan Franzen pointed out that David Foster Wallace was his friend, that there were people who’d only heard Wallace’s commencement speech rather than read his books or talked to him in person, who were now characterizing him as a saint.

In one essay, Franzen wrote, “I will pass over the question of diagnosis (it’s possible he was not simply depressive) and the question of how such a beautiful human being had come by such vividly intimate knowledge of the thoughts of hideous men.”

Surely an essay capitalizing on his friendship with another writer who committed suicide and intimating, without offering any evidence, that his friend was one of those hideous men must have struck the author of The Corrections as being just as suspect in its motivations as the belated attention of those people who paid Wallace’s work no attention during his lifetime. Or not.

***

We’re coming up on the fiftieth anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death, February 11, 1963. As most readers know, on that day she put her two children in a bedroom, stuffed a towel under the door, and stuck her head in an oven. This was about a month after Knopf turned down The Bell Jar saying that following Esther’s breakdown, “the story ceases to be a novel and becomes a case history.”

Just under fifty years later, Hollywood created a glossy fiction about her, a movie of surfaces that for intellectual property reasons was unable to quote from her poetry or her novel, the very reason people should care about the more intimate details of her life. Plath, rejected so harshly by the publishing industry while alive, has been embraced, a little too much, in her afterlife. Think of the fans that pillaged her headstone, repetitively, trying to remove the reference to Ted Hughes that exists in her last name.

Like many other teenage girl poets, I loved Plath not only for her more controversial well-known lines, but for her quieter poems. Take this line from “Poppies in October”: “O my God, what am I
/That these late mouths should cry open
/In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.” There was something addictive about Plath’s poetry, something powerful, subversive, stunning, and catchy.

I possessed all those other attributes of the cliché fangirl—the all-black wardrobe, the perfectionistic, withdrawn, and cynical moods. I delved into Anne Sexton, a very different poet, only because of her friendship with Plath. In short, like all fan girls, I aped Plath based on my limited information and my love of The Bell Jar, a book I might not have had access to as an American reader, if she had lived.

While Plath’s poetry is filled with mystery and myths, a rare violent beauty, and words about motherhood, the media, her fans, and her critics have been less interested in all of these than in her death obsession and lines like “Every woman adores a Fascist” in the poem “Daddy”. We’ll never know the calculus that caused her to turn on the oven and stick her head inside, though we can sense the tortured energy that created the poems in Ariel.

We can fool ourselves that her words allow us to divine who she was, the cause and effect of her life, but to believe that we have succeeded after all these years? It’s reflective of an adolescent spirit in our culture.

***

Writing a biography is hard. You patch together events that taken all together may not have any sort of arc. Often you rely on the reader’s intrinsic interest in the person to propel him forward through the text, through minutiae about what movie somebody saw on a particular day or what they thought about a political topic. In order to get inside the person to whom you can’t speak, you comb his or her letters, diaries, emails, grocery lists, searching for the sparks of insight that string together the events, making sense of them. With artists and writers, there is an illusion that you can get closer because there is always the work.

Consider how much more difficult it is to construct a biography of someone who has been marked as mentally ill. The mark that psychiatrists leave is a mark of unreliable narration. The process of memory even among the sane is a process of reconstruction, of drawing from actual recollection as well as one’s expectations, biases, prior knowledge and even later-acquired knowledge. We are, all of us, fictionalizing our own lives all the time, though most of us do not interrogate our memories, do not question how much of what we remember is real and how much construction.

Now imagine the mentally ill person, sitting across from a psychiatrist who tells him his perception of the world is wrong. The impact of being branded that way crosses over into memories. You are remembering and reconstructing from a vastly different position than the person who is not the subject of interrogation. It crosses over into your diaries, your emails, your letters, yes, sometimes even your grocery list.

David Foster Wallace experienced multiple courses of ECT over the course of his life. According to his mother, after six rounds in Arizona, he emerged “fragile as a child”. There is no way for a family member, for a biographer, for anyone outside to get inside that, to offer the truth.

On Salon, a writer debated the good and bad points of the ending of the audiobook of D.T. Max’s David Foster Wallace biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, which I had just listened to and which seems to embrace the medical model. After a few unadorned lines that state Wallace hanged himself and a few lines from a character’s death in Infinite Jest, the narrator ends, “This is not an ending anyone would have wanted for him, but it was the one he had chosen.” As the writer points out, this ending leaves the listener with a (weak) facsimile of the emotion that hit Wallace’s friends and family when they heard of his suicide.

The writer on Salon noted that by ending starkly rather than with the details that might satisfy some sordid gossipy urge, D.T. Max chose not to mythologize Wallace. I think that in fact there was simply no way to write about Wallace’s death in a way that could do the reality a justice, no way to avoid the mythmaking, the fictionalizing, that occurs around a break in ordinary emotions. There is no way, within the genre of literary biography, to capture anything more than the potentially thin connections between a life’s events and a mind’s work. It is the absence of concrete details that creates myth. Although it’s a good biography, it chose an easy way out of Wallace’s story by allowing us to fill in whatever details we wanted; whatever prejudices and biases we came to his story with, we left with. There is nothing wrong with that. Mythologizing is the way we make meaning.

 ***

I wonder if we have no magic bullet for mental illness because current psychiatric diagnosis cannot separate the “sickness”, the “malady”, from the person. ECT approximates a magic bullet by erasing memories, erasing the many narrative connections that make up the self.

Unlike biographies that end in death at the hands of others or by natural causes, literary biographies of people who have killed themselves are often faulted for their handling of the death—either for being overdramatic or not offering enough. I fall in the camp of wanting the biographer to offer more, rather than less. Our only connections to tragedy and disorder and the darker spaces of the human soul shouldn’t be television characters. As writers, too often we shy away from the messy, dark, uncomfortable reality, opting instead for an elegance in our endings as D.T. Max did with David Foster Wallace’s biography. It’s the kind of ending that allows the reader to create a reality in the unsaid. But as an audience, we seek the connection that a strong narrative, whether in biography or fiction, provides. We live for it.

***

Listen to Anita read this essay: 

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