At best, I see her not as my oldest friend, but as the protagonist in a movie, lost and beautiful and unstable, a character I sympathize with even as she self destructs.
After taking medications and following a treatment plan, the hospitalizations had gradually replaced family vacations, and I only seemed to be getting worse. “Is it possible you’re wrong about me?” I asked. “Is it possible this whole thing is a mistake”?
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.
Kaye Gibbons, author of the 1987 debut best-seller Ellen Foster and several subsequent novels, is the subject of an Associated Press profile published in several newspapers and Sunday book sections…