Madness: A Bipolar Life - Softcover

Hornbacher, Marya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007250649 ISBN 13: 9780007250646

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2009

Synopsis

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’.

About this title

Review:

‘A brave and engagingly entertaining survivor. The value of “Madness” is its first-hand description of bipolarity.’ John Sutherland, Financial Times

‘A writer’s exploration of the mental illness that has defined and at times destroyed her life. “Madness: A Bipolar Life” makes the starkest fact about bipolar disorder painfully clear.’ Sara Keating, Sunday Business Post

‘Unsettling, moving, “Madness: A Bipolar Life” is a vivid look into the whirling highs and horrible lows of a life lived with mental illness’. The Gloss magazine

‘Devastatingly frank’. Stella magazine

From the Back Cover:

"Hornbacher is a virtuoso writer." - New York TimesWhen Marya Hornbacher publisheda nationally bestselling memoir of her battle with anorexia and bulimia she had no idea that there was a piece of shattering knowledge that wouold finally make sense of the chaos of her life.Her struggles withmental illness, andthe story she would have to tell about them, were far from over.At twenty-four, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type I rapid-cycle bipolar disorder, the most severe form. In Madness, she detailsher fight back fromthe disease that nearly destroyed her.Tracing the history of her illness, she shows how bipolar can spawn a number of other conditions, including eating disorders, substance abuse, promiscuity, and self-mutilation. Like Hornbacher, many of us suffer from these never knowing that they are related tobipolar, that there is a larger cause for our particular pain. Now, in this brave, heart-stopping, beautifully written memoir Marya Hornbacher offers a challenge to the perception of bipolar in America.Madness is an incredibleportraitof a difficult, sometimes beautiful life."With the same intimately revelatory and shocking emotional power that marked [Wasted], Hornbacher guides us through her labyrinth of psychological demons." --Elle

"Hooks readers from the start .... [as Hornbacher] whips around this rollercoaster ride, her unflinching style keeps us firmly seated beside her." --USA Today Marya Hornbacher is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated national bestseller Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, a book that remains an intensely read classic, and the acclaimed novel The Center of Winter. An award-winning journalist, she lectures nationally on writing and mental health and lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota."

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0007250649
• ISBN 13: 9780007250646
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336