Madness: A Bipolar Life
A searing, unflinching and deeply moving account of Marya Hornbacher’s personal experience of living with bipolar disorder.From the age of six, Marya Hornbacher knew that something was terribly wrong with her, manifesting itself in anorexia and bulimia which she documented in her bestselling memoir ‘Wasted’. But it was only eighteen years later that she learned the true underlying reason for her distress: bipolar disorder.In this new, equally raw and frank account, Marya Hornbacher tells the story of her ongoing battle with this most pervasive and devastating of mental illnesses; how, as she puts it, ‘it crept over me like a vine, sending out tentative shoots in my childhood, taking deeper root in my adolescence, growing stronger in my early adulthood, eventually covering my body and face until I was unrecognizable, trapped, immobilized’. She recounts the soaring highs and obliterating lows of her condition; the savage moodswings and impossible strains it placed on her relationships; the physical danger it has occasionally put her in; the endless cycle of illness and recovery. She also tackles the paradoxical aspects of bipolar disorder – how it has been the drive behind some of her most creative work – and the reality of a life lived in limbo, ‘caught between the world of the mad and the world of the sane’.Yet for all the torment it documents, this is a book about survival, about living day to day with bipolar disorder – the constant round of therapy and medication – and managing it. As well as her own highly personal story, the book includes interviews with family, spouses and friends of sufferers, the people who help their loved ones carry on. Visceral and inspiring, lyrical and sometimes even funny, ‘Madness’ will take its place alongside other classics of the genre such as ‘An Unquiet Mind’ and ‘Girl, Interrupted’.
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Madness
a bipolar life
marya
hornbacher
HarperPress
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2008
Copyright © Marya Hornbacher 2008, 2009
PS Section copyright © Hannah Harper 2009, except âLives Too Often Kept Darkâ by Marya Hornbacher © Marya Hornbacher 2009
PS⢠is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
Marya Hornbacher asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007250646
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN 9780007380367 Version: 2015-03-26
The Cut
November 5, 1994
I am numb. I am in the bathroom of my apartment in Minneapolis, twenty years old, drunk, and out of my mind. I am cutting patterns in my arm, a leaf and a snake. There is one dangling light, a bare bulb with a filthy string that twitches in the breeze coming through the open window. I look out on an alley and the brick buildings next door, all covered with soot. Across the way a woman sits on her sagging flowered couch in her slip and slippers, watching TV, laughing along with the laugh track, and I stop to sop up the blood with a rag. The blood is making a mess on the floor (note to self: mop floor) while a raccoon clangs the lid of a dumpster down below. Time hiccups; it is either later or sooner, I canât tell which. I study my handiwork. Blood runs down my arm, wrapping around my wrists and dripping off my fingers onto the dirty white tile floor.
I have been cutting for months. It stills the racing thoughts, relieves the pressure of the madness that has been crushing my mind, vise-like, for nearly my entire life, but even more so in the recent days. The past few years have seen me in ever-increasing flights and falls of mood, my mind at first lit up with flashes of color, currents of electric insight, sudden elation, and then flooded with black and bloody thoughts that throw me face-down onto my living room floor, a swelling despair pressing outward from the center of my chest, threatening to shatter my ribs. I have ridden these moods since I was a child, the clatter of the roller coaster roaring in my ears while I clung to the sides of my little car. But now, at the edge of adulthood, the madness has entered me for real. The thing I have feared and railed against all my lifeâthe total loss of control over my mindâhas set in, and I have no way to fight it anymore.
I split my artery.
Wait: first there must have been a thought, a decision to do it, a sequence of events, a logic. What was it? I glimpse the bone, and then blood sprays all over the walls. I am sinking; but I didnât mean to; I was only checking; Iâm crawling along the floor in jerks and lurches, balanced on my right elbow, holding out my left arm, the cut one. I slide on my belly toward the phone in my bedroom; time has stopped; time is racing; the cat nudges my nose and paws at me, mewling. I knock the phone off the hook with my right hand and tip my head over to hold my ear to it. The sound of someoneâs voiceâI am surprised at her urgencyâDo you have a towelâwrap it tightâhold it upâsomeoneâs on their way
