The book reads like a memoir. It possesses a mastery of tone that’s deeply satisfying. I think I may have found a substitute—not a replacement!—for DrThe book reads like a memoir. It possesses a mastery of tone that’s deeply satisfying. I think I may have found a substitute—not a replacement!—for Dr. Oliver Sacks, who was a dreamy writer on subjects neurological. Author Esmé Weijun Wang’s perspective though is that of a patient. She suffers from schizoaffective disorder, which I have just learned has a manic aspect. She has been involuntarily institutionalized three times, and her last psychotic episode in 2013 lasted 7 months. How she comes out of that with a gift for fine expository prose is a mystery indeed. There’s a lurid exposé aspect to the book, too, it’s in part the story of how mentally ill students are treated at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. My God, it’s draconian, with huge female security guards attacking sick students—just beyond belief! Clearly the squeaky clean university will do anything to limit its liability, including indulging in discrimination against people with mental illnesses. It’s this sort of injustice, you might say, that constitutes Wang’s territory or beat. She also touches succinctly on mental health policy, involuntary institutionalization, life on the asylum ward, the depiction of mental health issues culturally—misperceptions, stigma, etc—and the myriad dangers of bearing children. (What if a schizophrenic mother should go mad? Who would care for her child? What if the child should become schizophrenic due to its genetic inheritance? How would a parent care for such a high-maintenance child over its entire lifespan? It could not be done. Eventually the child would be institutionalized, perhaps against his or her will. What if both the child and the parent should go mad? It’s not unknown. This is just the tip of the iceberg.) The book feels well grounded in our cultural moment. Wang is a gifted writer but, my God, talk about having to pay your dues to find your subject matter! Wang regularly deals with hallucinatory corpses lying in the streets, or monsters running her down so she has to jump or duck to avoid being body slammed, or believing that everyone around her has been replaced by robots identical in appearance to the missing, or that she is, in fact, dead, and that whatever existence she now leads is part of the afterlife. The distressing news though is Wang’s prognosis. She’s likely, she says, to get worse. She’s on a deadline of sorts, as we all are, but hers is more unrelenting. This leaves the reader with the sense of having come across a priceless rarity, a jewel hewn from the very substance that kills articulacy. It seems an impossibility that you’re holding such a treasure in your own hands. I’m recalling the decent or well written memoirs of mental illness I’ve read over the years. I can count them on my fingers. This is one of them. But why the author didn’t call it a memoir, I wish I knew. Read it, please.
PS Wang here mentions favorably Elyn R. Saks memoir The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, which is brilliant; but from the perspective of vividly showing the reader the depredations of schizophrenia, Wang’s writing is the more deft. Saks is a brilliant academic; her concern is mental health law. Wang is, by contrast, more of a prose stylist....more
Second reading. Though the book as a whole is brilliant, I’m particularly interesting now in revisting his descriptions of the small towns of rural PeSecond reading. Though the book as a whole is brilliant, I’m particularly interesting now in revisting his descriptions of the small towns of rural Pennsylvania, which I remember as dazzling....more
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