An Interview with Marya Hornbacher: On the forthcoming memoir Madness: A Bipolar Life
Q: Do you think your bipolar helps you as a writer? How and how not?
A: This question always cracks me up. My first response: Sure, I suppose it’s possible the bipolar somehow contributes to my writing (or writing process), in the eight months a year that I am actually able to write; I find the bipolar is less helpful for the remaining four months, when it is totally debilitating, and when I am by and large in my pajamas and out of my head, and regularly in the psych ward. Then, it helps not so much.
It’s true that many people with mental illnesses are very creative. There is the well-known and somewhat tiresome list of mad geniuses that is trotted out whenever someone wants to illustrate how romantic and fabulous and divinely inspired the mad mind is. Byron is a favorite, as is Woolf, and there is the ever-popular Van Gough and his regrettable situation with the ear. It’s worth noting that a staggeringly large number of these famous madmen and –women killed themselves, a move that ended some of the most important artistic careers of the modern age. What could they have done in their later careers that we might have needed, as art? Most of my friends happen to work in the arts, and several of them are writers; many of them have some kind of mental health diagnosis; and a terrible number of gifted people I have known have killed themselves before the age of 30. Was their mental illness the source of their talent? Did it give rise to their desire to create? Did the possibly unique pattern of their thought and perception lead them to certain insights that were of artistic worth? Maybe. I don’t know that. I would rather believe it did not; and in any case, I cannot account for the fact that most creative people are not mentally ill, or the fact that most mentally ill people, number-wise, are not particularly creative.
I do share with many bipolar people the actually chemically-driven urge to write or verbally express. In some stages of mania, the parts of the brain responsible for language and memory become dramatically more active, and I have many mortifying times found myself babbling so fast, or writing so maniacally (with and without shrieks and giggles), that I have become totally incomprehensible. There’s something called ‘flight of ideas’ in mania, where you are thinking so fast (and so brilliantly, at least in your opinion) that a listener will find their head spinning because you are moving from topic to topic so rapidly that all apparent logic is lost. This poses a problem with actually communicating with anyone; what this translates to in writing is that you are writing material useful only to yourself, that no reader will ever be able to share—in short, you’re writing for naught. When I’ve come down from these terribly entertaining and insightful manias, I’ve found myself with things like 1400 pages of garbage, or entire manuscripts of totally impenetrable, highly alliterative “poetry” that is almost awe-inspiringly bad.
And far more frequently, people with bipolar are so flattened by depression that they can neither feel or create. Being so far from any kind of desire to or ability to connect with others, or with the passion or whatever joy it takes to create, makes writing seem a long, long way off, so far you believe in your bones that it will never come again. Writer’s block doesn’t have a thing on the despair and alienation of the valleys of the disease.
And, ok, on extremely rare occasions, I find that I have written something valuable while in an extreme state of mind. But at a practical level, this is the fact: on the balance, I write far more valuable work when I am actually working, in a careful, crafted, disciplined way, than when I am totally half-cocked. Any writer needs a consistent clarity of thought in order to be able to produce good work. Do certain mood states make me write? They make me want to write, sure. But I write because I’m a writer. What helps me do that is the same thing that helps anyone else write: discipline and a passion for the written word.
Q: You write so beautifully about your friendships. What is important to you in a friendship?
A: When you actually sit down and think about it, you realize you don’t really have a standard concept of what a friend should or should not be. I don’t have any idea what makes me be friends with the people I am. I am more aware of what kind of friend I want to be—and as I have discussed with my friends, the urge to be good to and share with a friend is very similar to the urge to write or make art: you want to show a friend or a reader something that you have discovered and been moved by, something you think they will be as delighted by, comforted by, inspired by as you are. That’s probably the nature of love, when I think about it: it’s a desire to give. My friends fascinate me. They crack me up. They have such a unique take on the world that I find myself always seeing things anew. They are, though this is by no means a requirement, alarmingly intelligent. My friends and I have been through all kinds of degrees of hell together, and we have also shared what is best and most wonderful in our lives. My friends are the be-all and end-all of my life. I would literally pull my lungs out of my throat and give them to my friends if they really wanted them, and from what they’ve shown me, they’d do the same. What is important to me in a friendship? That I care about and love and want to always discover them as they are and as they become.
Q: Memory and memoir are complex, intertwined ideas. How do you work, as a writer, with what you say is a compromised memory?
A: Well, every writer is working from a compromised memory; our memories, as human persons, are very bad. Our minds, quite of their own volition, make things up—I don’t mean that they invent things and kind of lie, but that they delete things we don’t want to know, or misinterpret things, or pigheadedly refuse to deal with things we need them to examine so that we can grow. In practice, anyone writing any personal nonfiction, like memoir, needs to closely match remembered facts with verifiable facts. What I tell people in talks or classes as this: nonfiction is, you know, nonfiction. You do not make things up. That is fiction. Question: how much do you or can you embellish or change your story for the purposes of memoir? Answer: none The very nature of writing a memoir from life experience is that you are imposing a narrative on it when life is not structured in any way like a novel, to every memoirist’s dismay. The very fact of creating a narrative means you are cutting everything out that is not the story at hand. It honestly drives me a little bats when people say my memoirs are about my life; in my case, they’re about bipolar disorder and eating disorders. Those things are topics, not a record of my life; they are topics that other people care about or are interested in. Lord help us if anyone other than my mother and my therapist should care about my actual daily life, which is in itself tremendously dull, and as random and circuitous and unresolved as anyone else’s life. A good memoir takes a slice of someone’s life—a period, an experience, a theme—that can bring the reader inside a good story, one that they might need or want to know, or simply get a satisfying read, for themselves. A good memoir isn’t for me, a way to express myself or heal or work though. It’s for you.
For someone like me, someone who does have real holes in the narrative of my story as I remember it, all I can do is this: what I know and remember that I think is important to the book, I record, and like any memoirist create themes and connections that were not clear at the time. What I don’t know for a fact, I find out the same way I was trained to report: I interview my sources—family, friends, doctors, whoever knows something I don’t remember, or who can give me a second (third, fourth) opinion on what happened at the time; and I go to outside sources (medical or therapeutic records and notes, even things like letters, photos, emails, and scribbles from things I wrote back then). Between memory, physical or written source material, and interviews, I can reconstruct years and events and facts that are relevant to the book.
--Is it embarrassing or difficult to have so many readers know so much about you, now that you have written Madness?
Yes—in the sense that people know things about my life, more than me, that I’ve either tried to hide, or forget, or refused to think about, or tried shove in the closet of skeletons that everyone has (mine maybe being a little more full than others, certainly). But, as in any memoir, the narrator, me, becomes a character in the book; and like any character, the things that I have done, and events I’ve recorded, present me as a kind of person, with certain (often spectacularly unflattering) character traits, and I come off looking a whole lot less than white as snow. The things I’ve done or said or thought and felt, are, in both my memoirs, about being, you know, crazy. Do I feel like kind of a ratface when I read them? Yeah, in the same way I cringe when I look at myself or my life, as does mostly everyone else. (Is my cringing more acute? It’s definitely possible. But so it goes. We learn our lessons as we do.)
What’s hard, in the case of Madness, is that I, like most mentally ill people, am sharply aware of the stigma mental illness carries. I think people would like to believe that this stigma no longer exists—I have lots of friends on meds! I totally get it!—and in fact, a lot of people do get it, and have to a great extent gained enough personal experience, and enough information as the subjects get more coverage, that some people they have revised much of their emotional reactivity to the disorders. This is primarily true of people’s perceptions of depression; far less true of the perception of bipolar and the people who have it; and effectively not true of how people see and feel about people with schizophrenia at all. In a way, we have decided what is an acceptable mental illness and what is not. Those who depart too far from our agreed-upon and acceptable world are mocked—even if ever so pleasantly—and consistently discriminated in their ability to attain the rights and privileges that are afforded to the rest of the sensible sane. We still have the knee-jerk reactions of fear, discomfort, disgust, judgment, and hold some entirely inaccurate beliefs—the mentally ill are violent, this murderer “must have been very sick,” this person is lazy, this person is totally divorced from me and my world—and, most of all, a well-ingrained, if not always overt, belief that people with severe mental illness are hopeless, cannot be helped, are not functional, are the dregs of society, are not worth the money for research, and will not be contributing members of our economic and social world. Because of these perceptions, the major mental illnesses get the leftovers of research money, creating a situation where the medication available for bipolar and schizophrenia is not nearly as effective as it needs to be, and the insurance people desperately need in order to get their meds is hard to get and keep. And this is a circular system: the vast majority of mentally ill people can, if treated, function at a good, and in some case exceptional, level. They are not hopeless. The belief that they are is a stigma that destroys the option of a livable life to millions of people who deserve it just like anyone else.
So am I a little bit freaky about sending out 300 pages detailing the my own stigmatized illness? Of course. But not enough to keep it to myself. It’s more important to me that I share what’s also real about living with mental illness every day: that it’s not a door slamming on a good life, shutting us away from the world. We are not wastes, jokes. We can find a satisfying, often beautiful life. We laugh, and work, and live like anyone else. We, and our families and friends, need to know that so we can have faith and hope. We, the people who help us, need to better see the possibility we hold, and help us reach it. We, the people who dole out the rights and research that will make it possible for us to live on equal footing with those who we see as sane, need to believe in us, invest in us the resources granted to other treatable illnesses, and grant us equal access to our basic rights. And we, the society in which we live, need the door to open so we can connect, and see that the world we all see is the same.
--Do you read other writers on mental illness, or is that too painful? What do you love to read?
It’s not painful in the least. A lot of it is very bad, and so I read the work that takes on mental illness with insight and intelligence. I’ve read many books that have given me very specific and practical suggestions for managing my bipolar, and those have been essential to improving my daily life. I don’t read work that is solipsistic or does not try to reach me as a reader. I read a great deal of work on the social, artistic, scientific, and intellectual aspects of what I call madness, and I find these things engage me in on not only the daily life’s-hard level, but also on a level where I am able to that allows me to consider the fascinating workings of the mind, the brain, and the way people live in the world.
As for what I love to read: I read a staggering amount of poetry—old, modern, contemporary—because I find it delicious and also because I find it the single most important form in the development in how I write, use language, and see the details of the world I am trying to describe. I read plays for through-line and plot. I read a lot of novels, because like anyone else I like to wallow in a good story, and the older ones I read I read in part so I more vividly see a picture of that moment in history. I read a lot of essays because I adore nonfiction and the essay form, and I learn a vast great deal amount about the world, about humor and insight, and about the way to get a story or idea across. Every now and then I go on a philosophy binge. And I read the New York Times. Favorites: literary journalism of the 70s, Renaissance poetry, the Modern novelists, the Surrealists, the Beat poets, confessional poets, poetry from about 1950-1973, several contemporary novelists, and the current generation of essay writers, who are doing work that will be historically significant for in literature for a very long time.
--You mention your dogs in Madness. Do they react to your mood swings and if so how?
Actually, I have to confess that my dogs are spectacularly dumb. They have no insight into anything besides naps, dinner, and snacks. They are sweet and omnipresent, so for my purposes their absurdity (they are miniature dachshunds, which are hardly even real dogs) and glee and loafing about are a great comfort. The person (yes person) who really gets my moods and will not leave my side when I am even marginally bats is my cat Shakespeare, who is enormous and snobby to everyone but me.
--Your first book, Wasted, brought you considerable success and a wide readership when you were only twenty-four years old. At that point, your bipolar had just been diagnosed, and as you say in Madness, you were under the impression that you could ignore it if you wanted—to disastrous effect. How did your writing process differ---if at all---with Madness, now that you are both more mature and have a better understanding of your illness?
Well, first of all, I would certainly hope that my writing process and my insight and skill as a writer (and person) would improve over the course of a decade. How horrible if it hadn’t. Madness is a very different kind of book than Wasted, in part because the subjects are different, and in part because the voice in Madness is older and, I’d like to think, a little wiser and more thoughtful. I had a firm understanding of eating disorders when I wrote Wasted—their origins, their treatment, and, as is the most important thing in that book COMMA their relevance and role in society—and a developed sense of my own. I had a passion for recovery, and a faith that I had a story to tell and a case to make that might help, might educate, might change. But it was a younger self writing it, and one that was writing from a place of enormous chaos; it still amazes me that I was able to get that book written, and that it was (at least to my own very biased eyes!) a pretty good book.
Madness is also about something that has had a deeper resonance in my personal life: it has dogged me longer, has shaped who I’ve become, how I see, what I believe, and how I feel the world. I believe (and I am not alone) that eating disorders are an addiction. Mental illness is a physical disease. Granted, a lot of people with eating disorders may have some degree of underlying mental problems; but the influences upon the development of, and recovery from, also lie deep in how society operates and what it believes. Madness is about a secret I’ve kept, and thing beneath my skin, a thing I’ve fought and hidden from and tried desperately to make go away. There is a vastly greater stigma against mental illness, a stigma that has evolved over a couple of thousand years, and the people who have it are seen as profoundly other, frightening, strange. Detailing how you are one of those strangers to the ‘normal’ world, one of its outcasts, in some ways, is uncomfortable.
And the basic process of writing it was 180 degrees different: simply put, I’m medicated, and I’m not drunk.
Ultimately, this book comes, I think, from a deeper place. I don’t mean it was more cathartic or ‘therapeutic’ to write. I do not use memoir to process issues. I use them to connect—that is why I write anything, novels, poetry, anything at all. I want a reader to meet me halfway, and I want to reach them. I think I did have to reach deeper into experience, memory, belief; and I certainly was writing from another decade of education, writing, and the consumption of better books than my own. But Madness is about coming to terms. It is about going on. Ten years after Wasted, I’ve found a greater laughter, a greater peace. If Wasted was, as one review once said (to my never-ending entertainment), “a primal scream of a story,” then, I think, Madness is a song.